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Project 'Fuchsia': Google is Quietly Working on a Successor To Android (bloomberg.com)
A day after the European Commission fined Google over Android, more details about Fuchsia, a new operating system the company has been working on for several years has emerged. From the report: But members of the Fuchsia team have discussed a grander plan that is being reported here for the first time: Creating a single operating system capable of running all the company's in-house gadgets, like Pixel phones and smart speakers, as well as third-party devices that now rely on Android and another system called Chrome OS, according to people familiar with the conversations. According to one of the people, engineers have said they want to embed Fuchsia on connected home devices, such as voice-controlled speakers, within three years, then move on to larger machines such as laptops. Ultimately the team aspires to swap in their system for Android, the software that powers more than three quarters of the world's smartphones, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. The aim is for this to happen in the next half decade, one person said.
But Pichai and Hiroshi Lockheimer, his deputy who runs Android and Chrome, have yet to sign off on any road map for Fuchsia, these people said. The executives have to move gingerly on any plan to overhaul Android because the software supports dozens of hardware partners, thousands of developers -- and billions of mobile-ad dollars. [...] Still, Fuchsia is more than a basement skunkworks effort. Pichai has voiced his support for the project internally, said people familiar with the effort. Fuchsia now has more than 100 people working on it, including venerated software staff such as Matias Duarte, a design executive who led several pioneering projects at Google and elsewhere. Duarte is only working part-time on the project, said one person familiar with the company.
But Pichai and Hiroshi Lockheimer, his deputy who runs Android and Chrome, have yet to sign off on any road map for Fuchsia, these people said. The executives have to move gingerly on any plan to overhaul Android because the software supports dozens of hardware partners, thousands of developers -- and billions of mobile-ad dollars. [...] Still, Fuchsia is more than a basement skunkworks effort. Pichai has voiced his support for the project internally, said people familiar with the effort. Fuchsia now has more than 100 people working on it, including venerated software staff such as Matias Duarte, a design executive who led several pioneering projects at Google and elsewhere. Duarte is only working part-time on the project, said one person familiar with the company.
Either that's the reason for the switch or to get out of GPL constraints.
I never knew about this project several years ago
I haven't followed this too closely, but is it known if Fuchsia is Linux based?
Before, carriers told us what we could use our cell phones for.
The more things change...
Android is getting stunk on all directions: Fragmentation, lack of support and ease of use is leading customers to Apple on the high end Bloated memory requirements are leading 3rd worlders to KaiOS on the low-end Now the EU via this ruling and GDPR means you cannot take the mid-end's personal data and sell ads against it Google needs a new and more optimised, closed source mobile OS, that is updated directly by them and architecturally does not even give carriers or manufacturers the opportunity to use anything other than Google apps.
good luck with that, its like no one has ever tried to do this before and come to realize that different products/use cases have different requirements.
Will it isolate the users from their hardware even more?
Whether they call it Android / ChromeOS / Fuchsia or how it works generally doesn't matter.
But if their product is the most widely used (they have a monopoly), they can't force and stipulate anti-trust / anti-competent behaviour over OEMs (handset manufacturers) - just like Microsoft used to do.
Namely,
1. if the OEM wants access to app store, they can't force them to also bundle other Google apps exclusively;
2. they shouldn't bribe network operators and OEMs to install Google apps exclusively;
3. if a handset manufacturer wants to ship a custom Android build, Google shouldn't threaten them from denying access to the app store market, or to any other Google apps.
I would have thoughts nerds would be pretty happy about this, as it means more competition and a more open and free market place, such that others have a chance to create competing apps and services.
Creating a single operating system capable of running all the company's in-house gadgets...
Google are doing this even though they've [miserably] failed to create a single unified messaging application!
How about Gmail, that continues to suck big time?
I guess android just doesn't collect enough user data and is not quite invasive enough to the user's privacy.
They have to start again from the ground up to truly siphon every possible scrap of personal inormation.
Why "Fuschia"?
Everyone knows Mauve has the most RAM.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-17
I read the article, and an awful lot of the paragraphs are like "Fuchsia could ..." and "There are some signs ..." etc. I guess it's interesting to know how many people are working on it, that was the main actual "detail" I got from the article, most of the rest was just more speculation.
Oh no... it's the future.
The Android phone you buy today will soon be obsolete and stop getting any updates. Of course, most of the non-Google brand Android devices are lucky if they were ever updated. Google has done a great job of promoting their brand at the expense of your network security.
Fuck-U-sia is just the next step.
Fuchsia is a replacement for Linux. A different design with a different source code base and a different license.
As both Android and Chrome are only hosted on Linux both could replace Linux with Fuchsia when the later gains sufficient functionality. 3/4 of Android developers would neither notice nor care. Of the remaining 1/4 some percentage is only using Posix and not anything uniquely Linux based, so **if** Fuchsia provides Posix support they will not care are either.
It's 100% Java based. It runs a Java VM, running a Java VM, inside a Java VM, running on a Java VM.
it has 8 layers of indirection, each layer runs inside it's own core, which runs on a cpu optimized for java.
everything is written in java, from the hardware on up.
more indirection == more speed, and more security.
Once the phone boots, it can never be shutdown. When assembly of the phone is complete, the phones are booted, so when they get of the container ship, they have finished booting.
If the battery dies, you get a new phone, which will be pre-activated and pre-booted.
There is no local storage, everything is in the cloud.
There is no root access, everything is in 7 layers of sandboxes.
this will be the golden age of technology.
They had to, so they could start naming after colors, given the lukewarm reception to Android release Stinkweed-N-Grasshopper Donut.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Oh, fuck sia.
Step one will be: have everyone involved learn to spell that word correctly, because currently, no one does
It's SPELLED "fushia", but it's PRONOUNCED "fucks ya".
There are no practical Linux kernel security concerns that wouldn't also apply to something like Fuchsia. Any complex OS written by a small team will potentially have as many if not more security issues as Linux.
Advantages of the Linux kernel is a lot of eyeballs, mature codebase, reasonably good architectures, very wide hardware support, and known to scale up to very large systems.
Disadvantages of Linux is GPL and dealing with a large community of opinionated people. It can be difficult to get big architectural changes in unless a lot of time is spent convincing the top people on LKML.
Fuchsia is probably a better choice than forking Linux. It's smaller and does less so it will be easier to manage by a small team.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Under your logic Apple could be fined as well for the same reasons. Right down to the proprietary parts.
This will be as bad, or possibly even worse, than iOS. You just know it'll be trying to lock things down to keep people looking at ads. (And believe it or not, Android does not do that.) We'll have DRM web pages.
If they stop maintaining Android, then we're going to need a new OS for phones. If I had to guess right now, and this is totally terrible, I'd look to Microsoft. Not that it won't be pure unredeemable garbage, but it would still probably be the best you can get, from any user's point of view.
The aim is for this to happen in the next half decade, one person said.
WTF is wrong with you? Why can't you say 5 years?
NOBODY is going to rewrite their apps for this new OS.
They were reluctant for BB10 and Windows phone OS 7(?) back when market shares were up in the air.
Now there are 2 phone OS markets. That's it!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
doiwnvoted by marxists and collectivists, just another day on Slashdot.Org which has more concerns for SJW's and political correctness than true meritocracy.
Google used to be a company that embrassed free software. As employees have leaked they are now more obsessed than ever about competitors not just developing interesting things and then see if they sell. Maybe this was inevitable.
Android is already not free just releases tossed over the wall from Google. There is no way I can be part of Android development. Fuchsia just allows total lock down of the last open piece the kernel. Therefore better control. Some even say it will only allow network booting with caching on device, so really locked down.
Most of Android nastiness aren't the kernel's fault, e.g bloat, upgrade issues...
Even with Google's resources they will never have as functional a kernel as Linux. The Linux kernel has things like SELinux, iptables, great filesystem support, device drivers for everything. Great for tinkerers, not so useful to Google (they will only implement the few bits they really need). There is no danger Fuchsia will get all this with basically in house not fully open development.
You know more than 1 team works at Google, right?
Replacing Android would be silly. This sounds like a well-thought plan to launch a third OS into the market - one that has a better chance against iOS at the high end.
Develop a new OS, shift your devices to it starting with those furthest away from the smartphones, and when the time is right you split Android off, sell that division to a consortium of the Android device makers, and never look back. That time will likely be right before launching a new set of smartphones using whatever they decide to call Fuchsia and doing so without ever offering Fuchsia to any other company. This is why they must leave Android. They must do so to avoid breaking their own rules.
The key will be whether Fuchsia can achieve real world functional positives that can't be matched by iOS without a similar rewrite. It needs to do something like provide for a leap in power efficiency, security, memory efficiency, or AI integration.
Amazon quietly working on a search engine. Take that, Google assholes!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The Chrome browser will be integral to the OS... inseparable from the OS.
(Remember when Microsoft claimed to have made IE integral to Windows?)
It's written in C: https://fuchsia.googlesource.c... Google hired a bunch of former BeOS developers to work on it. (It's something new though, not related to BeOS)