The most common email we get is some version of: this looks great, when is the Android version? It is in development. I am not going to give you a date, and I would rather explain why than keep saying "soon" and then miss it.
Strip Orbit back and there are four systems in it: a live map, an emergency system, driving, and health. The first three could be built anywhere. The fourth is the reason the app exists, and it is not portable.
Live heart rate streaming from a wrist to a family member's phone, about once a second, is an Apple Watch capability. ECG results with Apple's own classifications, AFib burden, irregular-rhythm notifications, walking steadiness, perfusion index — those are Apple Watch and HealthKit. Android has fragments of this spread across Wear OS, Health Connect, Samsung Health and a dozen manufacturer layers that each behave differently. A cross-platform Orbit would not be Orbit on two platforms; it would be Orbit on one and a location app on the other.
Shipping a thinner product under the same name would make the marketing easier and the app worse.
This is a small operation. Every hour spent porting is an hour not spent on the thing a family actually notices — the call chain escalating correctly at 3am, the alert that fires once instead of four times, the trip that gets detected when the phone is in a coat pocket, the emergency brief that has the right medication list in it.
It means Orbit is probably not for you yet, and I would rather you knew that now than after you asked three relatives to install something. Every member of a Nest needs an iPhone on iOS 16 or later. The Apple Watch is optional — the app works without one — but the health half gets much richer with one.
The upside of the same decision is real: because we only target one platform, we can use it properly. Background location that survives an app kill. A watch companion that keeps readings flowing when the phone is in a bag. Wallet, HealthKit and watchOS permissions that behave the way Apple intended.
The map, the places, the alerts and the emergency system all port. The bar is the health half: continuous heart rate from a watch, an ECG equivalent, and a permission model consistent enough across manufacturers that a family in a mixed household gets the same product on both sides. Health Connect has been moving in the right direction, and that is the piece we are working through.
So it is being built, and it will ship when the health half survives the crossing rather than the day the map does. I will not announce a date I am not certain of — a family safety app that arrives late having been promised early is worse than one that arrives quietly. When there is a date, you will read it here first.