I find that writing which speaks of Google as a single "it" misses the mark. I say this because the Googlers who write here show many disparate views and pressures to deliverable.
Sure, we think "there is one vision" but I suspect, there will be people inside the tent who still think this is a good idea, or a variation of it, and so (not) is mostly conjectural, because nobody who CAN say with authority what is or is not being done, is going to want to commit until they understand how it affects their KPIs.
Considering why Google acquired Android in the first place, Some of this is a bit bizarre. You would think by now, there was a roadmap which made sense across the generations. We're at Android 15. Thats an awful lot of time in that model of the world and Fuschia is on what release trajectory?
I find that writing which speaks of Google as a single "it" misses the mark. I say this because the Googlers who write here show many disparate views and pressures to deliverable.
That doesn't matter if you're talking about a boolean outcome or the actions of the company as a whole. There could be 50%+1 person on one side of the internal debate and 50%-1 person on the other, and everyone outside of the company would still say "Google" to refer to the collective outcomes and actions of everyone there. The subtleties of what happens behind closed doors doesn't matter.
Individually Googlers are a disparate bunch. Collectively, they are "Google".
There's a pattern here of not invented here and Google forever obsessing about injecting their own versions of things. Android brought in a lot of technology not controlled by Google. Java, mobile Linux, stuff like that. It rejected Java for systems programming and came up with Go. And of course with Go they built their own compiler instead of building on the llvm ecosystem as well (unlike what Apple did with Swift).
It also rejected Java for frontend programming on the web, and Dart became a thing. Which eventually got repurposed for Flutter so they could get rid of Java on Android too. Early on, it started funding Firefox. But then it partnered with Apple on Webkit only to fork that into Chrome. And of course they then came up with Chrome OS (a linux based OS running their own browser. With Fuchsia the goal was to replace Linux and have a whole Google only stack and replace both Chrome OS and Android.
One thing that keeps on happening to Google is outside innovation making their internal efforts redundant. And because Google is so big, it usually doesn't take long for external stuff to start getting used internally and become more or less strategic. Dart/flutter solved a problem. But they never really got rid of Java. And then Kotlin came along and largely replaced Java on Android largely removing the need for Flutter. Flutter is not dead. But at this point it's also clearly not replacing Kotlin.
And Google's own Jetpack Compose was built on top of Kotlin in parallel to Flutter. Jetbrain's multiplatform version of that, which is now targeting everything that Flutter was targeting (IOS, Web, Desktop, Android), is starting to look pretty solid. Google just endorsed kotlin multiplatform at Google IO as well.
And you'd be wrong to dismiss Kotlin as a frontend only thing because at this point Amazon, Facebook, Google and most other big Java server side users are also deploying Kotlin for that at scale. These companies have many millions of lines of code of Java of course and that's not disappearing overnight. But they are increasingly treating that as legacy code and transitioning to Kotlin for new projects.
On the system programming side, Go has worked really well and it's pretty popular. But it did not really displace Java/Kotlin even inside Google. And now we have Rust popping up everywhere as a better C++. Including places like the Linux kernel. Rust is popular especially for things that need to be fast and secure. So, Go is kind of sandwiched between those ecosystems now.
The pattern here is Google having the right analysis about what needs doing, work on some internal solution, only to then have external solutions popping up that that remove the need for Google's in house thing.
This latest effort to reinvent sandboxing and salvaging some bits of Fuchsia needs to be looked at in the broader trend of people using WASM for that; especially server side. But of course WASM runs great in Chrome too. And thus on Android/Linux.
This project has been a complete cluster f since the beginning. I was excited when it was announced, though it seemed to get more and more relegated to nothingness since.
Now it's going to run in a VM in an already 'slow' os? For what possible reason?
I feel pretty much the same, and I suspect it's not an uncommon take. When it initially became known publicly, it seemed like they might be looking to try to make a legitimate competitor to Linux in the long term, but (and potentially be the first OS to make a compelling case for both desktop and mobile, which I still feel like we haven't seen anyone do yet), but at this point, it seems like they really don't have any concrete plans for it.
In hindsight, Fuschia is a pretty good representation of my opinion of Google as a whole since it first became public in 2016; eight years ago it was a lot easier to believe that they had some sort of big-picture idea of what they wanted to do, but nowadays it feels a lot more like their major products are basically just coasting on inertia, and nothing new they try to do has any sort of coherent long-term plan.
I guess by now, even its use on Google Nest Hub isn't even certain.
I had high hopes for the project, but it looks like a keeping engineers busy kind of thing, a pure cost center, without any revenue to keep it going besides Google Nest Hub being shipped with it.
I believe Fuschia and usage of Dart for projects like Flutter grew out this back-and-forth legal rigamarole between Google and Oracle over Java.
Plus, I believe at the time there was some core Chrome developers Google wanted to retain and keep busy with developing Flutter.
These are all cool projects, and there are hardly any companies developing actual operating systems nowadays. It would be sad to see it go, but on the otherhand, I haven't seen folks outside of Google use this OS despite its strengths, and perhaps that's the real problem
A new operating system done right gets engineers salivating and a lot of very senior staff have personal attachment to Fuchsia.
Personally I think it's a lost cause; every few years they change direction in hopes of finding a concrete use case that doesn't displace some existing Google project. The Nest was Fuchsia's greatest achievement and even that was held together with strings and glue behind the scenes.
Replacing an already very successful OS with a rewritten one, including a completely new kernel -- that would fundamentally break backward compatibility. And therefore it simply doesn't happen.
Only Apple could perhaps pull that off by forcing it on everyone by way of controlling the hardware base. Google and Microsoft don't have that amount of control.
The Fuchsia team is working on a Linux compatibility-layer, named Starnix[1], which is much like WINE on Linux. This would allow Linux applications to run on Fuchsia as-if they were running on a Linux kernel. A massive amount of work, but less work than adapting every single existing application to run on Fuchsia.
Back in 2022, there were signs[2] that Google was working on testing the Android Runtime (ART) on top of Starnix, by trying to get the clock app running on top of it. Most of this work has been done in private though, the tracking-issues mentioned in the article were quickly set to private after they were found.
I really believe we are not able to ship big new software projects anymore. If there isn't a pile of garbage to build up on...it's going to be vaporware. What a shame I was really excited about fuchsia in the beginning.
If you want to be able to run Fuchsia and Fuchsia apps on devices without having to first install a complete new OS - which might require root - this seems like a great advancement.
For me, if there's a Fuchsia app on the Play Store, or one I can easily sideload, I'll definitely try it out.
It could just be a stop-gap, or a low-risk test. They haven't said that it won't properly come to Android devices - if anything, this shows that there is interest for it.
Wouldn't it be a problem for Nest devices running on Fuchsia OS to get the hardware support they need? Most companies building consumer electronics products rely on hardware vendors to provide working kernels, drivers, etc. Speculatively, if you were able to leverage Android/Linux hardware support without the overhead of the rest of the Android OS, that would free up Nest from having to handle that problem.
When Fuchsia first came out, I was interested to go deep dive into it and be an early adopter/contributor. Good that I did not put in my time investment. There is always a risk with new projects but with Google there seems to be a longer wait and watch phase before you really double down on the project.
What Google revenue streams would full Fushsia cannabilize? Lack of USB->HDMI also bummer on pixel devices. I could probably convince a lot of people to migrate to chrome/fuschia/google OS if all it took was slapping their old phone to a usb hub. Well I could a few years ago, google kill services / lack of direction have put me off recommending any service by them. Still, seems like Google has a pathway to get into the Apple hardware game but simply chooses not to.
Oh no, who could’ve thought that Google won’t replace most popular OS in the world with experimental thing that has nothing behind it but tech journalist hype?
Android is going to eat Chrome, so would not be surprised to see Fuschia team layoffs as well as Chrome OS team layoffs in the next few months. Hard to say but from a revenue perspective the non-Android teams look as redundant as much of Motorola.
[+] [-] ggm|1 year ago|reply
Sure, we think "there is one vision" but I suspect, there will be people inside the tent who still think this is a good idea, or a variation of it, and so (not) is mostly conjectural, because nobody who CAN say with authority what is or is not being done, is going to want to commit until they understand how it affects their KPIs.
Considering why Google acquired Android in the first place, Some of this is a bit bizarre. You would think by now, there was a roadmap which made sense across the generations. We're at Android 15. Thats an awful lot of time in that model of the world and Fuschia is on what release trajectory?
[+] [-] onion2k|1 year ago|reply
That doesn't matter if you're talking about a boolean outcome or the actions of the company as a whole. There could be 50%+1 person on one side of the internal debate and 50%-1 person on the other, and everyone outside of the company would still say "Google" to refer to the collective outcomes and actions of everyone there. The subtleties of what happens behind closed doors doesn't matter.
Individually Googlers are a disparate bunch. Collectively, they are "Google".
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|1 year ago|reply
It also rejected Java for frontend programming on the web, and Dart became a thing. Which eventually got repurposed for Flutter so they could get rid of Java on Android too. Early on, it started funding Firefox. But then it partnered with Apple on Webkit only to fork that into Chrome. And of course they then came up with Chrome OS (a linux based OS running their own browser. With Fuchsia the goal was to replace Linux and have a whole Google only stack and replace both Chrome OS and Android.
One thing that keeps on happening to Google is outside innovation making their internal efforts redundant. And because Google is so big, it usually doesn't take long for external stuff to start getting used internally and become more or less strategic. Dart/flutter solved a problem. But they never really got rid of Java. And then Kotlin came along and largely replaced Java on Android largely removing the need for Flutter. Flutter is not dead. But at this point it's also clearly not replacing Kotlin.
And Google's own Jetpack Compose was built on top of Kotlin in parallel to Flutter. Jetbrain's multiplatform version of that, which is now targeting everything that Flutter was targeting (IOS, Web, Desktop, Android), is starting to look pretty solid. Google just endorsed kotlin multiplatform at Google IO as well.
And you'd be wrong to dismiss Kotlin as a frontend only thing because at this point Amazon, Facebook, Google and most other big Java server side users are also deploying Kotlin for that at scale. These companies have many millions of lines of code of Java of course and that's not disappearing overnight. But they are increasingly treating that as legacy code and transitioning to Kotlin for new projects.
On the system programming side, Go has worked really well and it's pretty popular. But it did not really displace Java/Kotlin even inside Google. And now we have Rust popping up everywhere as a better C++. Including places like the Linux kernel. Rust is popular especially for things that need to be fast and secure. So, Go is kind of sandwiched between those ecosystems now.
The pattern here is Google having the right analysis about what needs doing, work on some internal solution, only to then have external solutions popping up that that remove the need for Google's in house thing.
This latest effort to reinvent sandboxing and salvaging some bits of Fuchsia needs to be looked at in the broader trend of people using WASM for that; especially server side. But of course WASM runs great in Chrome too. And thus on Android/Linux.
[+] [-] silisili|1 year ago|reply
Now it's going to run in a VM in an already 'slow' os? For what possible reason?
[+] [-] saghm|1 year ago|reply
In hindsight, Fuschia is a pretty good representation of my opinion of Google as a whole since it first became public in 2016; eight years ago it was a lot easier to believe that they had some sort of big-picture idea of what they wanted to do, but nowadays it feels a lot more like their major products are basically just coasting on inertia, and nothing new they try to do has any sort of coherent long-term plan.
[+] [-] IshKebab|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wiseowise|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|1 year ago|reply
I had high hopes for the project, but it looks like a keeping engineers busy kind of thing, a pure cost center, without any revenue to keep it going besides Google Nest Hub being shipped with it.
It's a wonder how it wasn't axed already.
[+] [-] LarsDu88|1 year ago|reply
Plus, I believe at the time there was some core Chrome developers Google wanted to retain and keep busy with developing Flutter.
These are all cool projects, and there are hardly any companies developing actual operating systems nowadays. It would be sad to see it go, but on the otherhand, I haven't seen folks outside of Google use this OS despite its strengths, and perhaps that's the real problem
[+] [-] fishtoucher|1 year ago|reply
Personally I think it's a lost cause; every few years they change direction in hopes of finding a concrete use case that doesn't displace some existing Google project. The Nest was Fuchsia's greatest achievement and even that was held together with strings and glue behind the scenes.
[+] [-] cubefox|1 year ago|reply
Only Apple could perhaps pull that off by forcing it on everyone by way of controlling the hardware base. Google and Microsoft don't have that amount of control.
[+] [-] Raqbit|1 year ago|reply
Back in 2022, there were signs[2] that Google was working on testing the Android Runtime (ART) on top of Starnix, by trying to get the clock app running on top of it. Most of this work has been done in private though, the tracking-issues mentioned in the article were quickly set to private after they were found.
[1]: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/starnix [2]: https://9to5google.com/2022/07/15/android-removes-fuchsia-co...
[+] [-] Daub|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BoredPositron|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] n3storm|1 year ago|reply
Heterogeneous components software may be suboptimal, well it is, but at least is not ramsonware technology.
[+] [-] spankalee|1 year ago|reply
For me, if there's a Fuchsia app on the Play Store, or one I can easily sideload, I'll definitely try it out.
[+] [-] MaximilianEmel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] edderly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] prmoustache|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gobins|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] maxglute|1 year ago|reply
What Google revenue streams would full Fushsia cannabilize? Lack of USB->HDMI also bummer on pixel devices. I could probably convince a lot of people to migrate to chrome/fuschia/google OS if all it took was slapping their old phone to a usb hub. Well I could a few years ago, google kill services / lack of direction have put me off recommending any service by them. Still, seems like Google has a pathway to get into the Apple hardware game but simply chooses not to.
[+] [-] microtonal|1 year ago|reply
Google Pixel 8 supports DP-Alt, including USB-C to HDMI adapters:
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/2865484?hl=en
[+] [-] wiseowise|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] karlgkk|1 year ago|reply
It's been shipped to millions of devices, quietly.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] choppaface|1 year ago|reply
https://blog.chromium.org/2024/06/building-faster-smarter-ch...