Google silently kills its best third-party smart displays

What you need to know

• Google is no longer supporting or updating older smart displays as of April 2023.
• The list includes Lenovo Smart Display (7", 8" & 10"), JBL Link View, and LG Xboom AI ThinQ WK9.
• Google's remaining smart display platform, Nest Hub, is powered by a different OS than these displays.

It's been a long time since we've seen a new smart display debut from a company not named Google or Amazon, and now we know a good reason for that. Google is finally winding down support for its deprecated Internet of Things OS, Android Things, and, with it, the line of smart displays from companies like Lenovo, JBL, and LG.

These used to be considered some of the best smart displays but fell by the wayside as they hadn't seen major feature updates in years. While the Nest Hub is Google's lone line of smart displays these days, the Lenovo Smart Clock 2  and the original Smart Clock are still supported since they run a totally different OS from the rest of Lenovo's now-unsupported smart displays.

9to5Google discovered a note on a Google Support page that confirms the bad news. While it's likely that many of the smart displays on this list will continue to function normally for a while, we fully expect support for things like Duo calling to end as these smart displays continue to age and don't receive security patches.

While this news may be a bit surprising, Google has been slowly moving in a different direction with smart displays for years. Nest Hub is the company's own fully-supported in-house smart display, and Google is launching the Pixel Tablet in the very near future, which will seemingly run Android 13.

The Pixel Tablet seems to be a more premium type of smart display that doubles as a tablet that you can take to go. However, with the advent of new AI chatbots like Bard and Google apparently putting its AI teams together to challenge ChatGPT, we wonder how this will affect the future of Google's smart display efforts