Inside Andy Rubin's Quest to Create an OS for Everything

Here's some free advice: Don't try to break into Andy Rubin's house. As soon as your car turns into the driveway at his sprawling pad in the Silicon Valley hills, a camera will snap a photo of your vehicle, run it through computer-vision software to extract the plate number, and file it into a database. Rubin's system can be set to text him every time a certain car shows up or to let specific vehicles through the gate. Thirty-odd other cameras survey almost every corner of the property, and Rubin can pull them up in a web browser, watching the real-time grid like Lucius Fox surveying Gotham from the Batcave. If by some miracle you were to make it all the way to the front door, you'd never get past the retinal scanner. Rubin doesn't employ human security guards. He doesn't think he needs them. The 54-year-old tech visionary (who, among other things, coinvented Android) is pretty sure he has the world's smartest house. The homebrew security net is only the beginning: There's also a heating and ventilating system that takes excess heat from various rooms and automatically routes it into cooler areas. He has a wireless music system, a Crestron custom- install home automation system, and an automatic cleaner for his pool. Getting the whole place up and running took Rubin a decade. And don't even ask him what it cost.