Google has just lost yet another major employee on the Android side of things, this time on the Android Wear team. David Singleton who was officially “engineer lead” for Android Wear, but did make a lot of the announcements for the team at Google I/O and other Google events. So he was a pretty significant part of the Android Wear team, and now he is heading over to Stripe, which is a payment service, and will be taking on pretty much the same role as he had at Android Wear, at least in terms of titles is concerned. Singleton will be the engineer lead over at Stripe.
Singleton joined Google back in 2005 and worked on various projects. Including Google Fit, before becoming the engineering lead for Android Wear. Since Android Wear launched in 2015, the platform has been losing market share and interest from its customers. Google had planned a huge update for Android Wear in 2016, dubbed ‘Android Wear 2.0’ which was ultimately delayed until early 2017. It was indeed a huge update, but it still hasn’t driven in a ton of sales for smartwatches running the software like Google had hoped. So this could be a reason why Singleton is leaving (whether on his own accord or by Google wanting new leadership on that team). Singleton was at Google I/O 2017 earlier this year, updating developers on where the platform is heading and then demoing some of Android Wear 2.0’s best features in the sandboxes after the keynote finished on the first day.
This is a big hire for Stripe, who is a company that many people aren’t too familiar with, but it is definitely going to gain some popularity today, thanks to this hire. Stripe is basically the back-end software used by many businesses for their online stores. It’s a suite of different API’s and other software. The company thinks of its software as “the best software platform for running an internet business.” So it’s not really a consumer-facing company, more of a business-facing one, so that most consumers will never use Stripe, other than to pay for something they are buying online.