Google hopes to replace Android & Chrome OS with Fuchsia 'over the next 5 years' - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/google-team-is-said-to-plot-android-successor-draw-skepticism 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. 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. The initiative is focused on better competing with Google’s chief smartphone rival, iPhone maker Apple Inc. While Android’s roughly 85 percent market share crushes Apple’s 15 percent, the Apple operating system has a leg up in areas like performance, privacy and security, and integration across Apple devices. Another key advantage: Most iPhone users quickly update their phones when Apple releases a new version of the operating system, while less than 10 percent of Android users do. This means Google’s latest services only reach a fraction of Android users. "Switching away from Android could provide Google the opportunity to hit the reset button on any mistakes they believe they made a decade ago," said Jeffrey Grossman, co-founder of messaging app Confide. "They might be able to regain some power that they’ve ceded to device manufacturers and telecom carriers."

fucking nice

Fuchsing nice*

Hope it uses a native language this time round instead of Java, it could be so much more efficient.

iirc you can use C++ as well.

AFAIK only the syntax of Java is used, but they aren't compiled into Java programs which most of your performance worries come from. Google makes the Java compilers themselves. Also I'm pretty sure you have the choice to use C++, but Java is way more forgiving for beginners.

Yep, Fuchsia doesn't use Java, currently seems to support loads of different languages https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/11/20/google-working-fuchsia-os-support-apples-swift-programming-language/

I'm edging switching back to iOS just because I'm noticing lag again on Android. These phones run good for like almost a year before they play up again. Fuchsia from the looks of things doesn't look like it will be skin-able, wonder how other OEM's will feel

I fear it will be a 'equally bad at everything' disaster. This 'the same thing works on everything' has been tried and tried again, rarely works and rarely is worth it. Hope to be proven wrong though, the more OS the merrier.

Yeah but don't all phones do this? Including iPhone's? Nothing against either OS...

The current Android ecosystem for developers is terrible. I hope they trash everything and make a fresh start.

I would absolutely love this. Swift is probably my favorite language, and being able to use it to make non-iOS apps would be great.

Yes and no. And actually well-designed VM with caching (e.g. .NET with ngen) will have very close to native performance on a wider range of devices. It usually beats out fully native compilers in terms of future-proofing, since you can 'recompile' distributed binaries to support new (faster) instructions for certain expressions. The main reason Java in particular is slow is that its VM is kind of bad. It doesn't have value types (increasing memory use and garbage collection work), comparatively bad reflection and few native meta-programming facilities (prompting programmers to use slow abstractions in business environments), no real generics (they're erased at runtime (all parameters replaced with just Object, i.e. a non-generic container being used) and only let you use reference types, which often occupies more memory and makes access much slower due to checked 'down' casts). I don't know why Java apps start so slowly, though. Maybe using .zip files as executables just is a bad idea, but I can't vouch for that.

I see this less being a smooth transition over from Android, and more being a potential mess of smartphone OSes in the future. I just have this feeling that big players in the Android market, like Samsung, will either not bother with Fuchsia at all for some reason, or may even see it as an avenue to finally push their own alternate OSes and ecosystems (like Tizen) out to consumers. I mean, it would make sense. A lot of consumers don't even see Samsung phones as Android phones, just as "Samsung." Same generally applies to most of the bigger brands as well. I assume Fuchsia is going to have some sort of backwards compatibility though, because if not, that change is gonna fuck over a lot of people.

If custom ROMs will even be a thing, that is If Fuchsia can't be modified like Android can, they've already lost my interest

Not really, since the 64bit era kicked in for iPhones from the iPhone 5s, they all feel buttery smooth. There's obviously some degradation over time, but it's nothing unlike Android I don't think I necessarily blame the lag on the OS of Android tho, I think the developing system is total garbage and that makes the lag situation worse

Windows was pretty decent but it saw no support for mobile so it died, correct if im wrong?

If the EU has their way with Android this is probably how it'll die and be replaced.

Windows phone was more then decent, why it failed is a complex issue i dont really feel comfortable in answering.

Came into the market too late, couldn't attract new users due to a lack of apps, couldn't attract developers to make new apps due to a lack of users. That's the gist of it.

Yes and no. Certain older models of iPhones get hit really hard (seemingly at random) by new versions of iOS on the performance side of things, but as long as you hold off doing major updates until reports are out, you're usually good. My 6S is almost 3 years old now and still feels extremely snappy almost all the time, though occasionally it does hiccup or have bad times opening some apps or performing some actions for the first time after rebooting. Overall it's an absolutely fantastic phone still, and I highly recommend the iPhone SE which has the same internals but more battery life in a better form factor. Battery is still at 85% of original capacity, too, so I'm not getting performance limitation either.

Ah, the Wii U effect...

Ya, Open Source***(with many asterisks, you know, Google Play) was just an early stunt they pulled to get an early foot in the door, just for sakes of throwing their mass around and get (nearly) everyone to use their OS for broad market-crossing usage. The user data alone that those devices carry and collect are worth billions, but the aftermath is, they are stuck with Android, the horrible patchwork of a Java based, Linux kernel driven mobile OS that usually has like 4 layers of developers and coders to assemble updates and patches together. They could just say: fuck y'all, last android version, we are moving to our new OS where we are not required to make it easy for open source. Nothing we could do, we still have the core of AOSP that could be kept alive but a whole vacuum of infrastructure that a literal "pull the plug" scenario. This is a highly unlikely scenario though, because they want access to this data on all those devices and they don't want some other competitor filling the void. Which is why they are so aggressive in their monopoly tactics in order to get others Google Play certified, no rebranded Android for you. (which worked quite well, until it didn't) Which leaves Google and us in this situation, they could slowly replace parts of android with non-copyleft licenses, which they done for ages, slowly replacing open-source apps with proprietary ones, only doing that to more integral parts of Android, doing effectively a slow in-place-refactor. (Which is my personal guess is what they will be trying to do) They could also decide just a different OS with a different app ecosystem entirely, which wouldn't really stop other OS's to try the same, Starting from scratch isn't a strong leverage position, Google is a powerhouse, but it ain't the only one. Many current Android manufacturers would very well jump in and make themselves the middle-man instead of being forced by the market to use Google's framework. Hell, there is nothing stopping them making a collective effort to make an Android/AOSP fork where the only real loser would be Google. I don't really see either happening, the Open Source keeps them somewhat at bay because other devs or manufacturers can jump in, a complete switch and abandonment of the old app and Android ecosystem also really unlikely. (It would also signal devs that entire work up to this point was for naught, happy costs starting that all up again, truly a great signal to send) They will probably just bloat up Google Play Services like they do now and slowly roll the app ecosystem over until they can literally switch out the kernel and the JVM and arrive at their point of destination. So that they can convert their broad usage and ecosystem for control and leverage while never loosing access to millions of devices or fear of getting outperformed by a competitor. Summary and Conclusion: AOSP stays, that is the beauty and tragedy of open-source, but if Google does it clever, they can slowly transform Android into something not easily modifiable, and there isn't much that can be done if that eventually succeeds. Custom Roms could be locked out of the entire app ecosystem, then you might as well bow to our new Google-overlords or go with a different open source phone like Librem 5 and be restricted to whatever that ecosystem offers and/or is reachable via a web-browser. Or hell, emulate Fuchsia on it.

Might as well buy an iPhone if they switch to a closed ecosystem

Hopefully these will make chromebooks all not suck. My brother says Chromebooks are the most returned items at his store.

the JVM has a decently large warmup period because there's a lot of boot code and JITting to be done. But after that, the (at least, oracle) JVM is one of the fastest (compiled-ish) languages on the planet. It can even out perform C by way of runtime optimization via tracing, e.g. figuring out how the code runs and optimizing with assumptions. The JVM JIT is an absolutely massive feat of engineering that everyone learning programming should learn about. doesn't stop the Java language from being just rancid, but there are other JVM targeting languages like Kotlin. (the second fastest is LuaJIT, honk honk)

Well... no, Iphones are still overprice garbage

i switched to an iphone yesterday, compared to samsung's android ios actually feels like a finished product

While I disagree, there's also the hardware and price

Very interesting bit from the article that I didn't put in the OP The company must also settle some internal feuds. Some of the principles that Fuchsia creators are pursuing have already run up against Google’s business model. Google’s ads business relies on an ability to target users based on their location and activity, and Fuchsia’s nascent privacy features would, if implemented, hamstring this important business. There’s already been at least one clash between advertising and engineering over security and privacy features of the fledgling operating system, according to a person familiar with the matter. The ad team prevailed, this person said.