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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.
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.
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