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Google's Not-so-secret New OS (techspecs.blog)

Posted by msmash on from the inside-andromeda dept.

According to reports late last year, Google is working on a new operating system called Andromeda. Much about it is still unknown, but according to the documentations Google has provided on its website, it's clear that the Fuchsia is the actual name of the operating system, and the kernel is called Magenta. A tech enthusiast dug around the documentations to share the followings: To my naive eyes, rather than saying Chrome OS is being merged into Android, it looks more like Android and Chrome OS are both being merged into Fuchsia. It's worth noting that these operating systems had previously already begun to merge together to an extent, such as when the Android team worked with the Chrome OS team in order to bring Update Engine to Nougat, which introduced A/B updates to the platform. Google is unsurprisingly bringing up Andromeda on a number of platforms, including the humble Intel NUC. ARM, x86, and MIPS bring-up is exactly what you would expect for an Android successor, and it also seems clear that this platform will run on Intel laptops. My best guess is that Android as an API and runtime will live on as a legacy environment within Andromeda. That's not to say that all development of Android would immediately stop, which seems extremely unlikely. But Google can't push two UI APIs as equal app frameworks over the long term: Mojo is clearly the future. Ah, but what is Mojo? Well it's the new API for writing Andromeda apps, and it comes from Chromium. Mojo was originally created to "extract a common platform out of Chrome's renderer and plugin processes that can support multiple types of sandboxed content."

2 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Work me, personal me, my kid by raymorris · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I could quickly and easily switch users on my phone, I'd immediately set up three profiles to keep things separate:

    Ray@work
    Ray@play
    RaysKid

    No more accidentally triggering auto-complete of a personal URL while at work. I can let the kid play a game on the phone while I'm driving, knowing the toddler won't be clicking on important work or personal stuff.

  2. Re:Is Google slowly dropping Java? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Since much of this already exists in Chromium, does that mean that Google is pushing for JavaScript / Progressive Web Apps? You could have lighter installs of application or just links to web apps run. It almost sounds like they're going the Firefox OS route.

    Google has been threatened with serious problems by Oracle with Java. Google was effectively forced to build an alternative with zero Oracle input in it so that, if they had lost the suits, they had a place to go with their products. Now that it looks like Oracle is losing, there's a chance that Java based stuff will survive long term, however the groups that sprung up with alternatives will not be killed for a long time. They now have a chance to kill Java in Google or at least take its crown as the leader. Perfect example of the killing the goose that could be laying you golden eggs. Oracle could easily have sat there and profited from their ownership of java by merging the Android and JVM environments. Instead they will likely damage even their corporate ecosystem.