29 ms·

Google’s not-so-secret new OS

634 points by techenthusiast 10y ago

bitmapbrother 10y ago
The author calls it Andromeda OS, but is this really the Andromeda OS we've been hearing about? I'm not so sure about that. What we do know right now is that the OS is currently code named Fuchsia. Fuchsia repository: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/?format=HTML https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/?format=HTML
- techenthusiast 10y ago
  There has been other reporting about this going back to last fall. I don't think Fuchsia is the marketing name.
skybrian 10y ago
re: "Flutter was [...]" A bit weird to use the past tense here since it's not reached 1.0 yet. You can try it out today (tech preview) to create apps in Dart that run on Android and iOS: https://flutter.io/ https://flutter.io/ (Googler, not on the Flutter team itself, but working on related developer tools.)
- techenthusiast 10y ago
  Fair point! Just fixed that, thanks. I had only meant that Flutter was not originally intended for Andromeda, as far as I can tell :)
antoncohen 10y ago
Link to the source code: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/
mcguire 10y ago
"The pitch will clearly be that developers can write a Flutter app once and have it run on Andromeda, Android, and iOS with minimal extra work, in theory." How's that going to work? iOS, specifically? Is Dart a supported language?
- afsina 10y ago
  This may answer your question: https://flutter.io/faq/#how-does-flutter-run-my-code-on-ios https://flutter.io/faq/#how-does-flutter-run-my-code-on-ios and https://flutter.io/faq/#can-i-interop-with-my-mobile-platforms-default-programming-language https://flutter.io/faq/#can-i-interop-with-my-mobile-platfor...
  - mcguire 10y ago
    From the first link: "The engine’s C/C++ code is compiled with LLVM, and any Dart code is AOT-compiled into native code. The app runs using the native instruction set (no interpreter is involved)." Thanks!
brianon99 10y ago
Google is just afraid of GPL I think.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  There's a ton of good reasons to replace Android beyond licensing. Security being the largest one. Fuchsia is designed with security in mind from the ground up, Android arguably is not (at least not from the sense of what is considered security today).
- ekianjo 10y ago
  So their strategy is to go full-blown closed source?
  - brianon99 10y ago
    I mean they just hate GPL, not open source. Just look at the removal of BlueZ GPL library in 2012. [1]https://lwn.net/Articles/597293/ https://lwn.net/Articles/597293/
  - bretpiatt 10y ago
    K8s is Apache 2.0. Who's to say they don't open the whole project when ready as they have in other cases? Source: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/LICENSE
  - sreenadh 10y ago
    Open sourcing the product will help the competition to catch up quickly, all they have to do is take googles product and change its look. The next half is infrastructure, which companies like Microsoft, facebook, amazon, alibaba all have. Plus services like AWS will help future version of dropbox & netflix. A good example of that is Visual code. I am sure some at github (atom's paprent) is pissed.
    - jryan49 10y ago
      Wikipedia says it's not a fork of atom but based on electron. Does that make a difference?
yen223 10y ago
Rust as a first-class language?
- mastax 10y ago
  I believe the article over-sells Fuchsia's use of Rust. Raph Levien wrote some bindings to the OS runtime, and he does work at Google, but his Rust work is not-official. (or that's the story as I remember it)
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Which is a shame, they are missing an opportunity to ditch C/C++ in favor of a safer language and set a precedent in OS history. Imagine how easier contribution would be if you could write the OS parts with less lines, guarantied to no introduce most security and concurrency bugs we know about.
  - techenthusiast 10y ago
    Ah, thanks for clarifying. I updated the article to be more conservative about Rust's inclusion.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
pier25 10y ago
We definitely need a universal OS for all our devices and I really believe Google is in a great position to get us there. It would really surprise me if Apple got there first. Tim lacks vision and will keep on milking iOS even if the iPad Pro is a failure as a laptop replacement. Windows is still king in the desktop space, at least as far a user base goes, but it's terrible on tablets and phones. MS has all the tech in place with UWP, but it's still pretty far in the race in terms of simplicity and usability. Chrome OS ticks all the right boxes, and is experiencing a huge growth, but it's not universal. If Andromeda is real, and it's able to become a universal OS that merges Chrome OS and Android it might be the best thing since sliced bread.
- forrestthewoods 10y ago
  What? God no. We need competition. A single OS controlled by a single corporation with their own conflicting interests is a million miles from what we need.
- supremesaboteur 10y ago
  Operating System is about applications. Even if Google comes up with a universal OS there will be many applications that only run on Windows forcing people to continue to use it
  - remir 10y ago
    And this is why we need an open source clone of Windows, which is king of the desktop OS. Beside geeks, the average people doesn't care about operating systems, they care about being able to run their apps. It's sad that ReactOS doesn't get more support from the community.
- mastazi 10y ago
  > Windows [...] [is] terrible on tablets and phones. Surface tablets seem to be doing OK though.
  - MBCook 10y ago
techenthusiast 10y ago
Article author here. Posted this in the notes, but possibly too buried: For anyone interested, I intend to write quite often about consumer technology on this blog. Topics will include hardware, software, design, and more. You can follow via RSS or Twitter, and possibly through other platforms soon. Sorry for the self promotion! Thanks for reading. Please do send any corrections or explanations.
- roymurdock 10y ago
  Wondering what your background is as you state you're not a programmer but you can obviously parse code (at least at a high level) and have familiarity with the OS ecosystem. Market research? Great analysis btw.
  - techenthusiast 10y ago
    That's very kind, thank you. And yeah, you guessed right - I was an industry analyst for four years.
- markdoubleyou 10y ago
  Great first post, hope you keep it up! Only feedback is that I had to reread this sentence several times before I was confident I'd parsed the negations correctly: "I also can’t imagine the Android update problem (a symptom of Linux’s modularity) won’t at last be solved by Andromeda, but one can never be too sure."
  - techenthusiast 10y ago
    Thanks for the kind words. I debated that sentence, but you're right - always avoid double negatives. I'll fix it now.
- Inconel 10y ago
  I have nothing constructive to add aside from that I appreciate the simple uncluttered design of your blog. The typography and glasses logo are very pleasing to my eyes as well. Good luck and I look forward to reading more.
resoluteteeth 10y ago
Is this an actual plan of Google as a company, or is this some sort of Microsoft-style war between divisions where the Chrome team has just decided on its own that the future is based on Chrome and Dart? Also, considering the way that the ARC runtime for Chromebooks was a failure and had to be replaced by a system that apparently essentially runs Android in a container, will it really be possible for a completely different OS to provide reasonable backward compatibility?
- pavanky 10y ago
  The blog talked about many different things. Not all of them may be related to each other. It is pure speculation from the author.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  I think Google just wants to transition to an OS with a micro-kernel architecture with the smallest possible attack surface. Also, user space drivers should help with the update problems they've always had with Android.
- throwawaydbfif 10y ago
  I would say that Google is trying to replace JavaScript with dart in any way they possibly can. The reason is simple, JavaScript is an open standard, dart is owned by google. Their reasons that "dart is better" is the typical google koolaid before they attempt a market takeover. As we've seen over and over with Android, chrome, and AMP especially. Google loves to make glass house open source projects you can't touch. You're free to look at how great it is, feel it's well refined curves and admire the finish, but God help you if you don't like how the project is going and want to fork it for yourself. Don't bother trying to commit a new feature to any of Google's software that they don't agree with. It will languish forever. Don't bother forking either, because they'll build a small proprietary bit into it that grows like a tumor until it's impossible to run the "open source" code without it. Fuck dart, I don't care how great it is. Microsoft is being the good one in this case by extending js with typescript, google is trying to upend it into something that they control
  - 10y ago
grizzles 10y ago
Since Fuscia is a new kernel, that means it will probably only support Google hardware. The status quo right now among android hardware vendors is to violate the GPL, and they have faced few if any repercussions for doing so. I wonder if Fuscia is sort of viewed as the way forward to addressing that. Anyone care to speculate why there isn't a community version of chromium os? I'd donate to it for sure. It sounds like getting android apps working on it would be pretty easy: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?hl=en#!topic/chromium-os-discuss/OfBln-hl7ug https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?hl=en#!topic...
- jakeargent 10y ago
  Well, there's Cloudready[1] which is ChromeOS for any computer. I installed it on mom's laptop (ancient device) and it works well. [1]: (https://www.neverware.com/freedownload/ https://www.neverware.com/freedownload/)
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  >The status quo right now among android hardware vendors is to violate the GPL No it's not the status quo. The major OEM's do release their code. Yes, there are some Chinese OEM violators, but that's typical of China.
  - grizzles 10y ago
    You can release code and still violate the GPL in other ways. For example, there are binary blobs out there and the GPL is pretty unequivocal on this point: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
    - matthewmacleod 10y ago
      Releasing binary blobs is definitionally not releasing the source, though.
    - simonh 10y ago
      It depends whether the binary blob is a derived work or not. http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html
wapz 10y ago
I'm a minority I know but I don't like material design because it's terrible at "scaling." It looks great, it's beautiful, but you lose too much damn functionality. When I had to redo apps to material design we had to completely remove multiple buttons due to them not fitting material design standards. I really hope they have some way to alleviate this problem without using 50px icons for all the extra buttons.
- ungzd 10y ago
  I think this OS will be mostly for entertainment so there's no need for lots of UI, only "Play" and "Pause" buttons.
- manmal 10y ago
  Why not bend the rules a bit before omitting vital components?
  - wapz 10y ago
    They weren't vital components but useful for the user. We moved most of the "excess" buttons to the top bar and overflow menu but still had to remove a button here and there completely (we still had the functionality in a different part of the app it was just more tedious to use from our testing).
akmittal 10y ago
>the main UI API is based on, yes, Dart Won't the Dart's single thread nature be bad to take advantage of Murli core processors? Or they are embracing web workers?
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Dart, in the context of Fuchsia, isn't really a web based language. So yes, it'll take advantage of multi-core processors.
- oomkiller 10y ago
  Dart supports full concurrency via actor-like Isolates. Currently on the web, you need to use a web worker though, yes. https://lucamezzalira.com/2013/06/11/isolates-how-to-work-with-multithreading-in-dart/ https://lucamezzalira.com/2013/06/11/isolates-how-to-work-wi...
sjtgraham 10y ago
> The pitch will clearly be that developers can write a Flutter app once and have it run on Andromeda, Android, and iOS with minimal extra work, in theory. This is worrying for Apple. I can see the following playing out - Apple continues releasing machines like the TB MBP, much to exasperated developer dismay. - Other x86 laptop industrial design and build quality continue to improve. - Fuchsia/Andromeda itself becomes a compelling development environment - Developers begin switching away from Mac OS to Fuchsia, Linux and Windows - Google delivers on the promise of a WORA runtime and the biggest objective reason not to abandon Mac OS, i.e. writing apps for iOS, disappears. - Apps start to look the same on iOS and Android. iOS becomes less compelling. - iOS devices sales begin to hurt. Granted that the App Store submission requires Mac OS (Application Loader) and the license agreement requires you only use Apple software to submit apps to the App Store and not write your own, but it seems flimsy to rely on that.
untog 10y ago
If nothing else comes out of this, I hope we end up with an Android OS that works better than the current one. I've been running Android since the Nexus One so I'm no newbie to the platform, but the ease with which iOS manages to get all UI interactions at ~unnoticable FPS and outstanding battery life is staggering when you're used to Android. It feels like some really fundamental choices were made badly on the platform that make it incredibly inconsistent and unreliable. A fresh start would be fantastic.
- Inconel 10y ago
  As a fellow Nexus user, I've owned the Nexus One, 5, and currently use a 6P, how much of this is due to the OS versus hardware? Will Google ever be able to achieve Apple level battery life or overall UI smoothness, not to mention update support, without having their own custom SoC? I was very happy with the 5, even with the intermittent lags, especially considering it's price at release. I suppose I'm not a very heavy phone user, and I never play mobile games, but I've been very happy with the 6P on Android 6.0-7.1. Battery life could definitely be better, and it does get fairly warm at times, but overall it's been a very good experience for me considering the Snapdragon 810 it's using is generally poorly regarded.
  - pcnix 10y ago
    Google has been hinting at their own soc for the third gen Pixel devices though, so that is something to look forward to.
  - scott_karana 10y ago
    Apple has had fluid UIs since the start, despite off-the-shelf, low resource Samsung SoCs. They only started making custom ones after with the 4S, as I recall.
    - glasz 10y ago
      exactly. it's not (only) a hardware issue.
    - 10y ago
vii 10y ago
It's awesome that Google is doing this and in public too https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ Unfortunately, the hard part of an operating system isn't in a cool API and a rendering demo. It's in integrating the fickle whims of myriad hardware devices with amazingly high expectations of reliability and performance consistency under diverse workloads. People don't like dropped frames when they plug in USB :) Writing device drivers for demanding hardware is much harder than saving registers and switching process context. The Linux kernel has an incredible agglomeration of years of effort and experience behind it - and the social ability to scale to support diverse contributors with different agendas. Microsoft, with its dominant position on the desktop, famously changed the 'preferred' APIs for UI development on a regular cadence. Only Microsoft applications kept up and looked up to date. Now Google has such a commanding share of the phone market - Android is over 80% and growing http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os - they have a huge temptation to follow suit. Each time that Microsoft introduced a new technology (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundatio... WPF) they had to skirt a fine line between making it simple and making sure that it would be hard for competitors to produce emulation layers for. Otherwise, you could run those apps on your Mac :) There are many things to improve (and simplify) in the Android APIs. It would be delightful to add first class support for C++ and Python, etc. A project this large will be a monster to ship so hopefully we'll soon (a few years) see the main bits integrated into more mainstream platforms like Android/Linux - hopefully without too much ecosystem churn
- empath75 10y ago
  it doesn't need to be a general purpose OS and is probably going to target mobile devices and laptops. I don't think supporting a wide range of hardware is even on the road map.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- xiaoma 10y ago
  Given that it's Google, I wonder if it will support the languages favored by bootstrappers and small startups—Obj C, Ruby, JavaScript and more recently Swift and Elixir. I get the distinct impression that they're heavily optimizing large team productivity and aren't a fan of functional or highly expressive languages. It's too bad, given how much nicer their app approval process, etc is than Apple's that the Android dev experience has been so much worse all these years.
mncharity 10y ago
> I don’t see the average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine allowing for a target higher than 60fps realistically. But... "average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" doesn't describe any of C/C++, Dart, Go, Java, Python, or Rust. Nor Javascript. I get greater than 60 fps with my existing Vive three.js WebVR-ish electron/chromium linux stack. Even on an old laptop with integrated graphics (for very simple scenes). Recent chromium claims 90 fps WebVR, and I've no reason to doubt it. So 60 fps "up to 120fps" seems completely plausible, even on mobile.
- saghm 10y ago
  > But... "average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" doesn't describe any of C/C++, Dart, Go, Java, Python, or Rust. I'm curious; what would be an example of something you would describe as an "average garbage collected language using a virtual machine"? Java would certainly be the first language I'd think of for that description.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Java is not using a VM on Android since ART was introduced, although on Android 7, it is a bit more complicated, given the mix of pure Assembly interpreter, PGO driven JIT and AOT compiler.
  - munificent 10y ago
    > I'm curious; what would be an example of something you would describe as an "average garbage collected language using a virtual machine"? Ruby 1.8, Lua, or CPython.
    - saghm 10y ago
      Python was included in the list of things considered not to be in this category; I probably agree with you on that one, but the idea behind my question was that the languages listed as not "average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" included several that I'd include in that category. What do you think makes Ruby and Lua more "average" than Java?
MarkMc 10y ago
It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a limited, buggy way [1]. If Google had put meaningful effort into developing such a strategy we would by now have a relatively simple way to develop software which runs on 99% of laptops and 85% of smartphones and tablets. Developers would now be targeting 'Android first' instead of 'web app first then iOS then maybe Android'. Sundar, if you're reading this - do it! [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/hack-runs-android-apps-on-windows-mac-and-linux-computers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/hack-runs-android-ap...
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser.
  - foota 10y ago
    Maybe I'm just jaded from downloading video games, but, at least on a landline, I don't think most people would care?
    - ghostly_s 10y ago
      For people who've already committed to Chrome, it might just be a one-time annoyance. But the time when Chrome had an seeming lock on the top seat in the browser wars has come and gone. I can definitely see this hurting new adoption, which would rightly make Google nervous.
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      It could make sense as an optional download if you do want Android support. But, Google would never increase the download size of their browser to that extent.
gillianlish 10y ago
guys i hate to tell you this, but it's Feb 15 here in New Zealand, and Google has cancelled Andromeda.
- solidsnack9000 10y ago
  http://platypusplatypus.com/news/google-andromeda-isnt-happening/ http://platypusplatypus.com/news/google-andromeda-isnt-happe...
thinkloop 10y ago
Why can't the pure web replace apps and programs? All the pieces are almost there: hardware acceleration, service workers, notifications, responsive design... I currently "add to home screen" for most things. I edit my images online, and develop code using cloud9 ide, etc. There are few things I need apps/programs for right now, and that's improving day by day. iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share, but they still have a lot of the wealthy users. There is a non-zero chance they get niched out of prominence by Android (aka every other manufacturer in the world), at which point network effects start encouraging Android-first or Android-only development. There might be a point where Apple needs to double down on the web, and/or maybe kill off apps, like they did flash, to still have the latest "apps".
- fredsir 10y ago
  Because it's a horrible experience. That's just my anecdotal view, but I have never tried a web based app (electron native app thing or webapp in the browser) that is as great an experience (UX and UI) as the best of the best native apps on Mac and iPhone, and I'm not sure it's possible to push web tech that far without reimplementing everything in the web stack and making it as close to native that we're better off just writing native apps. EDIT: spelling.
  - netheril96 10y ago
    > but I have never tried a web based app (electron native app thing or webapp in the browser) that is as great an experience (UX and UI) as the best of the best native apps on Mac and iPhone I would say I have never tried a web based app better than average native apps. (Except for GMail, because I don't like the sync feature of mail clients).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Because it just sucks, browsers were designed for interactive documents, not applications. No HTML5 UI/UX comes close to what is possible to achieve with native APIs in any platform. For old dogs like myself, it always seems that younger web dev generations are rediscovering patterns and features we were already doing in native applications during the 90's. Also solutions like service workers look like some sort of kluge to sort out the problem to do offline applications in browsers. WebOS, ChromeOS (barely used outside US) and FirefoxOS are all proofs that the experience is substandard.
therealmarv 10y ago
This blogpost has waaaay too much assumptions. When reading about this it seems easy to rip out Kernels, OS & Software and put it like a layer on a cake on top of a new OS. Even for Google this is crazy complicated. It will not be that easy. For sure not... and I also see no clear strategy WHY somebody should do that. It's like baking the cake with too much ingredients. ;)
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I can see the kernel thing happening. Just the licensing and breaking ABI is one of the biggest factors in not being able to have an easily upgradable android. I only see this as a good thing if this ensures an easier upgrade path than in Android; and if vendor ROMs can easily be replaced by a stock OS (like on Windows).
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    I definitely can not see the Kernel thing happen. Ever thought of power management and keeping the whole system fluent? This are all not easy problems which you solve in 1 or 2 years. It may only work for very specialized hardware... speaking of hardware. Hardware driver support is also something most other Kernels suffer from in comparison to e.g. Linux.
    - Roy0 10y ago
      > Hardware driver support is also something most other Kernels suffer from in comparison to e.g. Linux. So? Google doesn't have to support all hardware, they can pick to support only the hardware they want. That's what they already do with ChromeOS. Installing ChromiumOS on unsupported hardware can have its issues. The reverse is true too, installing not-ChromeOS Linux or another OS on Chromebook does not always work well, although it's fine on some specific models. Android is like that too, and in a much worse way than for Chromebooks. We're not talking about stellar linux kernel support for all the custom ARM SOC that are out there. All manufacturers write their own closed source hardware support for android and this is how android ends up having issues with updating, since whenever Google updates the linux kernel it breaks the ABI and all the support manufacturers wrote for the previous version, and manufacturers do not want to spend so much time on needless busywork such as keeping up with kernel API churn that exists just to satisfy the dev team sense of perfection.
junk_disposal 10y ago
When this takes off, how hard will it be to install custom roms? One of the great things about Android is that Linux is GPL, so at least the kernel code is open.
camdenlock 10y ago
This could be the first time Apple needs to truly worry about Google. The one massive lead Apple still has over Google (and the other major players) is the incredible OS they inherited back in 1997 and continue to extend and maintain today. Neither Android nor Windows nor Chrome OS nor your favorite Linux distro have ever been able to truly compete with the NeXT legacy as it lives on in Apple. Google is smart enough as a whole to see this, and so it's not surprising that they're attempting to shore up their platform's competence in this particular area. What IS surprising is that it has taken them this long. Perhaps what's truly surprising is just how much mileage Apple has gotten out of NeXT. It's astounding, and I know Apple realizes this, but I question whether or not they know how to take the next step, whatever that may be. And if Google manages to finally catch up...
- hota_mazi 10y ago
  > This could be the first time Apple needs to truly worry about Google. Er... what? Apple has been worried, and actually threatened, by Google every day since 2008, when the first version of Android came out. Without Android, Apple would probably have a 90% monopoly on mobile phones today. Saying they might be "worried" is beyond an understatement. They are absolutely furious at Google, as Jobs was until he passed away.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Android's global market share, even with Apple, is 85%. Bear in mind, the iPhone is only popular in the US, which is responsible for most of the remaining 15%. Outside the US, Android is a completely unquestioned monopoly.
    - hota_mazi 10y ago
      You seem to be responding to a different post than mine.
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        You know, I think on the second to last line on your comment, I transposed Apple and Android or something like that. :/
lenkite 10y ago
AFAIK the flutter UI framework is a react-like framework written in Dart (with C++ as OS glue) including the UI -> graphics rendering layer. It builds upon Skia and Blink. I am not sure how that will allow compatibility with other languages. The only language for UI apps looks to be Dart. Which isn't bad - its a pretty well designed language, but I don't see how apps can be written in a wide variety of language as the author suggests.
junk_disposal 10y ago
From a developer's point of view, on one hand, I like this idea. Just about any development environment is better than Android: 1. Callbacks are horrendous. I hate inner classes, they're ugly and unwieldy. I'd honestly rather something like AWT's (Yes, that 90s tech) callbacks over inner classes. Just have a main function with a large switch. It's much easier to reason that then the current mess-up of trying to figure out your app's lifecycle. 2. Inter-thread communication is horrendous. Android is Java based, so can I pass classes? No. Only Strings. And even that is horrendously ugly. 3. It's a Frankenstein model. It's a Desktop OS like process/file model, but not everything is a file. Now they suggest opening using the new file-picker. But in many ways files are easier to use. 4. They add new libraries (Material Design, for example) which no one will ever use, because everyone needs to use appcompat. And even in five years, when Lollipop will be like Android 2.2 is now, everyone will still have to use appcompat to get Android Z libraries on Android O, or something. And by the way, now most apps rely on appcompat-7 which relies on appcompat-4. 5. Many classes are broken - Take TextView. You can style it with HTML, but only a small subset (so you can't use it as a WebView). So it's not meant as a "web browser" replacement. But it can parse broken HTML. Wow, so developed. But you can't style a link color, or change underline color. ------------ But on the other hand, I'd find it horribly annoying (and I think that many others would feel the same way) having to rewrite everything from scratch into Dart or whatever.
avmich 10y ago
I didn't see in the article explanations why those decisions were taken and not others. On the surface it feels like this is an OS insufficiently different from others to justify switching to.
am185 10y ago
wow! it supports Golang, since it has glsl, this will have nice UI. https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:third_party/go https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:third_pa...
maheart 10y ago
How credible is this source? I don't understand half the decisions outlined in the article. > I also have to imagine the Android update problem (a symptom of Linux’s modularity) I seriously doubt the Linux kernel is anything but a minor contributor to Android's update problem. Handset developers make their money by selling physical phones. In two years, your average consumer probably doesn't care if their device is still receiving software updates. They'll jump onto a new phone plan, with a fresh, cool new mobile, with a better screen, newer software (features!), and a refreshed battery. Maintaining existing software for customers costs handset manufacturers $$$, and disincentives consumers purchasing new phones (their cash cow). The money is probably better spent (from their POV) on new features, and a marketing budget.
- felixge 10y ago
  > In two years, your average consumer probably doesn't care if their device is still receiving software updates. They'll jump onto a new phone plan, with a fresh, cool new mobile, with a better screen, newer software (features!), and a refreshed battery. This might be true for the US, where 75% of subscribers are on post-paid (contracts). It's not true for the rest of the world. * Europe: < 50% post-paid * Rest of the world: < 22% post-paid I'd also argue that Android users will be more likely to be pre-paid than post-paid customers (compared to iPhone users) in all of these regions, but I have no data to back it up. Anyway, I agree that it's probably not very profitable, if at all, for android handset makers to support their devices for > 2 years. But I think many customers would benefit from it ... [1] http://www.globalrewardsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/GRS-Mobile-Top-up_Wireless-Market-Statistics-2015.pdf http://www.globalrewardsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/GRS-...
  - ianai 10y ago
    I think the "post paid" connection leading to a 2 year lifecycle is suspect. There's a big after market repair industry in the US. Many people have a singular cell phone as their internet device - and it's often ancient by IT terms. 2+ year old hardware needs to be getting software/OS upgrades.
    - 10y ago
conradev 10y ago
Here is a link to the documentation: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/master/docs https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/master/docs
mankash666 10y ago
I hope the userland is POSIX/Linux compliant. There's a TON of useful software reliant on this compliance that will go to waste if it isn't compliant out-of-the-box.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  It doesn't seem to affect ChromeOS, iOS or Android.
conradev 10y ago
The drivers-wifi repository contains a stub for a Qualcomm QCA6174 driver[1] which is found in the Nexus 5X[2], OnePlus 2[3] and meant for smartphones[4]. The drivers-gpu-msd-intel-gen repository contains drivers for Intel 8th and 9th gen integrated graphics[5]. I think it's fair to propose that Google plans on running Fuchsia on both smartphones and laptops… [1] https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/drivers-wifi/blob/master/qualcomm/driver.cc https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/drivers-wifi/blob/master/q... [2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+5X+Teardown/51318#s112148 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+5X+Teardown/51318#s112... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/OnePlus+2+Teardown/45352#s100455 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/OnePlus+2+Teardown/45352#s10... [4] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7921/qualcomm-announces-mumimo-80211ac-family-increasing-the-efficiency-of-80211ac-networks http://www.anandtech.com/show/7921/qualcomm-announces-mumimo... [5] https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/drivers-gpu-msd-intel-gen/blob/master/src/device_id.h https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/drivers-gpu-msd-intel-gen/...
chatman 10y ago
Microsoft is opening up more and more, and Google is closing down more and more.
MichaelMoser123 10y ago
The article says it's a microkernel, I wonder if it will be a more secure general purpose OS, well windows NT started as microkernel but they changed that wit NT 4,let's see if it will be different. I also wonder about driver support and battery consumption. Good luck to Google.
diebir 10y ago
Quote: "I am not a programmer, so if anything stated above is incorrect, please, please send me corrections. I would also greatly appreciate any clarifying comments, which were one of my primary motivations for writing this piece." Essentially a bunch of nonsense, in other words.
mtgx 10y ago
It would be a real shame if Google wasted this once in a decade or perhaps once in multiple decades opportunity to not have an OS written in a language other than C++. Also, it would be mind-boggling if they didn't actually fix the update problem this time, and if it wasn't a top 3 priority for the new OS.
- frozenport 10y ago
  It's written in C. There is little beyond syntax that a different language can offer because a modern OS cannot afford features like garbage collection. Indeed, this was one of the research aims of MS's Singularity project.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    They could have written it in Rust. No garbage collection, more security guaranties. Easier to contribute to the code properly.
    - frozenport 10y ago
      Rust performed 3x slower and hacking around the language made it somewhat of a mess [1]. Much like Singularity, this is hardly a success story. Although Singularity was interesting from a research perspective nobody doubted that an OS could be written in Rust. https://scialex.github.io/reenix.pdf https://scialex.github.io/reenix.pdf
      - steveklabnik 10y ago
        That paper is very old, before Rust 1.0. There was also a lot of discussions about ways that they could have used Rust better at the time, IIRC. Today, there is no reason Rust should ever be 3x slower, especially in an OSdev context, where you currently have to use nightly.
- pathsjs 10y ago
  Too many negations, I can't parse. Do you want an OS written in C++ or not? :-)
bsaul 10y ago
Trying to see the other side of the coin : what economical reason is there for this project ? A company the side of Google, with all its internal politics, doesn't work as a startup. Starting a third operating system project and hoping it to replace two major ones means convincing people inside the company to loose part of their influence. Now it may happen if chrome or android were failing, but they're clearly not.
bitL 10y ago
Seems like Free Software that propelled early Internet pioneers served its purpose and those companies are turning their backs on it - first with Apple, GCC->LLVM, now with Google, Linux->Fuchsia :( I am getting afraid of another dark age on the horizon... I guess it's going to be inevitable as 90% of SW developers will find themselves redundant when inferring AI capable of composing code blocks and listening to/reading speech/specifications arrives in upcoming decade, making creation of typical web/mobile apps trivial.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  This is either fantastic satire or hopelessly optimistic. What you are describing is a human level artificial general intelligence. Probably more than 10 years out.
  - bitL 10y ago
    Not really, for simple apps you can use what we already have in place with some meta-programming rules prepared by humans (currently only a few companies posses this capability though). You can use ML like deep learning variations to learn association between your wishes and corresponding code blocks. Initially apps like that would be simple, i.e. "make a web page", done, "change background color to pink gradient", done, "place gallery of images from my vacation to the center", done, "show me the photos", "remove this one", "make this one smaller", done, "add this title", "add my paintings underneath", "add a buybox next to my paintings", add "checkout to the top" etc. NLP is now there already, but initially you'd need a lot of human "drones" for associating "wishes" with code - doable by companies like Google (they can bake in learning into Android Studio) or by scanning GitHub etc. We already have stupid mobile apps generators, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't have what I described within next 10 years.
    - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
      Sounds like something that could be used for customizing a CMS a little bit, but software development is something very different from what you're describing. Developing software requires understanding of completely open ended natural language. NLP is nowhere near that level of AI and doubt that it will be in the next 30 years.
michaelmrose 10y ago
It was unfortunately obvious that the writer had insufficient tech chops when use the phrase "a post-API programming model" But pressing on how somehow manages to blame the lack of updates to android phones on the modularity of the Linux kernel. The joke of course being that linux is monolithic and googles new OS is a microkernel ergo more modular. The quote is "...however. I also have to imagine the Android update problem (a symptom of Linux’s modularity) will at last be solved by Andromeda" Its hilarious that he can somehow defying all sanity ascribe androids update issue to an imagined defect in Linux. Android phones don't get updated because for the manufacturers ensuring their pile of hacks works with a newer version of android would represent a non trivial amount of work for the oem whom already has your money. The only way they can get more of your money is to sell you a new phone which they hope to do between 1-2 years from now. In short offering an update for your current hardware would simultaneously annoy some users who fear change, add little to those who plan to upgrade to a new model anyway, decrease the chance that a minority would upgrade, and cost them money to implement. Its not merely not a flaw in the underlying linux kernel its not a technical issue at all.
- bjarneh 10y ago
  > would represent a non trivial amount of work for the oem whom already has your money This is it; unless crucial apps (or some other necessity) only work with a newer Android version (which could push OEM's to update) they never will. Much better for OEM's to hope that you'll "update Android" through the purchase of a new phone.
  - coredog64 10y ago
    The carriers bear some blame as well. Apple negotiated for the right to upgrade the OS without carrier review, but most Android device OEMs don't. So the carriers drag their feet as well, hoping you'll buy that new device from them and be locked in for another 2 years.
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  >The only way they can get more of your money is to sell you a new phone which they hope to do between 1-2 years from now. Right, but they will never get my money if they don't deliver timely OS updates for the old model. You're right of course that this issue has absolutely zero to do with Linux.
Insanity 10y ago
> IDEs written in Java are wildly slow… My favourite IDE to use today is IntelliJ, and I prefer it over my experience with Visual Studio (though to be fair, I did not use VS intensively in the past 3-4 years). I don't experience IntelliJ as "slow". It launches faster than VS did when I used it, and once it is running I keep it open pretty much the entire work-week without any issues.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Other than Netbeans and Eclipse being faster and don't turn my dual core into airplane mode like Android Studio does, which forced me to enable laptop mode on it.
  - Insanity 10y ago
    I don't really understand what you are trying to say, sorry :/
- mcroft 10y ago
  It's an odd statement to make, given that he states he's not a programmer in the notes.
- msgilligan 10y ago
  There are steps in the Android tool chain build process that are slow (i.e. much slower than pure Java build) but IntelliJ/AS platform IDE is plenty fast on my (admittedly top-of-the-line) 2012 MacBook Pro.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
HNLogInShit 10y ago
Sounds like a mess.
xtat 10y ago
Honestly I'd rather keep the linux and ditch the JVM
BrailleHunting 10y ago
NIH syndrome plus large organization people looking for job security, and rough, fat FLOSS full of maintenance and security vulns hell equals "Emperor's new clothes."
endorphone 10y ago
Conjecture is fun, but the linked piece takes some enormous liberties with crossing massive chasms effortlessly. Not only is Fushia not Andromeda (a project), the needs of IoT is massively different from the needs of Android. And the net investment in Android is absolutely colossal, and making some new APIs or a microkernel does not a replacement make.
dep_b 10y ago
So in the near future billions of devices will no longer be running Linux anymore? That would be quite a blow to the OS in terms of chances of dominating operating systems that are being used by end users. Or will they simply fork it and strip it down until only the parts they really like will remain?
- atoponce 10y ago
  This is also a concern of mine. What will this mean for rooting devices? Will it still be root, or will it be "root" as it an iOS jailbreak?
sametmax 10y ago
Google could have taken firefox and improve it to make it better, but they created something new. Now instead of improving the linux stack and the gnu stack (the kernel, wayland, the buses, the drivers), they rewrite everything. They put millions into this. Imagine what could have been done with it on existing software. They say they are good citizen in the FOSS world, but eventually they just use the label to promote their product. They don't want free software, they want their software, that they control, and let you freely work on it.
- discordianfish 10y ago
  Everybody's modern linux stack is built on 40 year old design and assumption. While it's remarkable how well these work so many years later, I welcome that somebody like Google tries something new.
- geodel 10y ago
  > Google could have taken firefox and improve it to make it better, but they created something new. This does not work. They were initially working on webkit but technical decisions they wanted were different from apple/webkit team so they had to fork. It is much better they implement their technical ideas with their resources.
- lossolo 10y ago
  Isn't Google paying to Mozilla for Google searches from inside search bar in Firefox ? Isn't like main money flow for Mozilla? More people use Chrome, more money Google saves. It's all about the data, making Firefox better didn't benefit Google as good as creating new browser. Now they do not have to pay so much for all their users searches to other companies and they have so much more data that they can use internally for other products.
  - teddyh 10y ago
    No, that ended in 2014. Google no longer gives Mozilla anything.
kzrdude 10y ago
Does anyone have a more detailed explanation of the component called “modular”?
iainmerrick 10y ago
"Fuchsia" and "magenta" are pretty gutsy names to choose, given how similar it sound to Apple's vaporware "Pink" OS from the 90s (AKA Taligent, AKA Copland). Somebody has a sense of humor! It's really hard to tell if this is actually something that will ship, or yet another Google boondoggle to be swiftly discarded (like the first attempt at ChromeOS for tablets). Google under Larry Page built and discarded a lot of stuff; I wonder if it's the same under Sundar Pichai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Sounds like a stretch having to go all the way back to the 90's to get a similar color code name.
  - iainmerrick 10y ago
    It was the first thing those unusual names made me think of. But I'm a long-time Mac developer, so probably pink and purple colors as OS names won't have the same connotations for other people.
ungzd 10y ago
I think it's intended for entertainment and content consumption just like Android and Chrome OS. And Apple is trying the same with merging iOS and desktop. How long it will take until all computers will be set-top boxes where you can only netflix and chill and if you want, for example, to draw something, you have to buy Professional Grade Computer for $50000?
Nypro 10y ago
So Google is going with a DartVM on this one. Dart is cool and all, but why DartVM? It's the same restrictive model we have with Android (dalvikVM) where you can only develop with languages that can compile down to Java bytecode. In this case, however, we will be using languages that can transpile to Dart source instead! Why not JavaScript engine? With the current movement with WebAssembly, I see a lot potential use cases. The biggest point being the ability to code in any language that compiles to wasm. The engine could be exposed to communicate with the OS directly or sth. If they are going to consider V8 alongside DartVM, then that would be cool. I truly hope they don't repeat old mistakes.
- thwd 10y ago
  Dart can compile to JS, so that edge is covered. Dart bytecode is arguably an easier target for other language compilers than, say, assembly. The DartVM's byte code is fully specified, there is some adoption, it's openly accessible, and there's a bold, production-ready reference implementation. For wasm, only half of that is true.
  - sp332 10y ago
    Compiling Dart to JS is a very different problem than compiling JS or other languages to Dart.
    - thwd 10y ago
      I understand what you mean and agree. But then, you don't need to compile JS into Dart. Rather, JS into DartVM byte code.
- munificent 10y ago
  > Why not JavaScript engine? Having your bottom level language semantics be dynamically typed seems to place a real cap on application performance. Given that the underlying machine code is typed, I don't think it makes sense for the lowest level language you can target to be dynamically typed. (WebAssembly is basically an acknowledgement of that fact.) > The biggest point being the ability to code in any language that compiles to wasm. Conversely, I don't think WASM is a great target language either. It doesn't include GC, and I don't think it makes sense for each application to have to ship its own GC and runtime. WASM is a good target for C/C++, but not for higher level languages like Java/C#/JS/Python/Ruby/Dart. They say they intend to support GC, but they've been saying that for a while and I haven't seen much motion yet. I don't think Fuchsia can afford to wait around for that.
Flenser 10y ago
ANDROid + chROME + DArt = ANDROMEDA?
shams93 10y ago
As a sound/music app person the inclusion of ASIO for audio is exciting, Google's new is should be on par with iOS for sound with ASIO audio drivers at the core.
techenthusiast 10y ago
I updated the article with the following clarification at the top: I use Andromeda equivalently with Fuchsia in this article. Andromeda could refer to combining Android and Chrome OS in general, but it's all the same OS for phones, laptops, etc. - Fuchsia. I make no claims about what the final marketing names will be. Andromeda could simply be the first version of Fuchsia, and conveniently starts with "A." Google could also market the PC OS with a different name than for the mobile OS, or any number of alternatives. I have no idea. We'll see.
HiroP55 10y ago
The comment about Java based IDEs being slow is not entirely objective and fact based. I'd say it's more of an emotional argument.
em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

634 points by techenthusiast 10y ago

The author calls it Andromeda OS, but is this really the Andromeda OS we've been hearing about? I'm not so sure about that. What we do know right now is that the OS is currently code named Fuchsia. Fuchsia repository: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/?format=HTML https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/?format=HTML

techenthusiast 10y ago
There has been other reporting about this going back to last fall. I don't think Fuchsia is the marketing name.

skybrian 10y ago

re: "Flutter was [...]" A bit weird to use the past tense here since it's not reached 1.0 yet. You can try it out today (tech preview) to create apps in Dart that run on Android and iOS: https://flutter.io/ https://flutter.io/ (Googler, not on the Flutter team itself, but working on related developer tools.)

techenthusiast 10y ago
Fair point! Just fixed that, thanks. I had only meant that Flutter was not originally intended for Andromeda, as far as I can tell :)

antoncohen 10y ago

Link to the source code: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/

mcguire 10y ago

"The pitch will clearly be that developers can write a Flutter app once and have it run on Andromeda, Android, and iOS with minimal extra work, in theory." How's that going to work? iOS, specifically? Is Dart a supported language?

afsina 10y ago
This may answer your question: https://flutter.io/faq/#how-does-flutter-run-my-code-on-ios https://flutter.io/faq/#how-does-flutter-run-my-code-on-ios and https://flutter.io/faq/#can-i-interop-with-my-mobile-platforms-default-programming-language https://flutter.io/faq/#can-i-interop-with-my-mobile-platfor...
- mcguire 10y ago
  From the first link: "The engine’s C/C++ code is compiled with LLVM, and any Dart code is AOT-compiled into native code. The app runs using the native instruction set (no interpreter is involved)." Thanks!

brianon99 10y ago

Google is just afraid of GPL I think.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
There's a ton of good reasons to replace Android beyond licensing. Security being the largest one. Fuchsia is designed with security in mind from the ground up, Android arguably is not (at least not from the sense of what is considered security today).
ekianjo 10y ago
So their strategy is to go full-blown closed source?
- brianon99 10y ago
  I mean they just hate GPL, not open source. Just look at the removal of BlueZ GPL library in 2012. [1]https://lwn.net/Articles/597293/ https://lwn.net/Articles/597293/
- bretpiatt 10y ago
  K8s is Apache 2.0. Who's to say they don't open the whole project when ready as they have in other cases? Source: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/LICENSE
- sreenadh 10y ago
  Open sourcing the product will help the competition to catch up quickly, all they have to do is take googles product and change its look. The next half is infrastructure, which companies like Microsoft, facebook, amazon, alibaba all have. Plus services like AWS will help future version of dropbox & netflix. A good example of that is Visual code. I am sure some at github (atom's paprent) is pissed.
  - jryan49 10y ago
    Wikipedia says it's not a fork of atom but based on electron. Does that make a difference?

yen223 10y ago

Rust as a first-class language?

mastax 10y ago
I believe the article over-sells Fuchsia's use of Rust. Raph Levien wrote some bindings to the OS runtime, and he does work at Google, but his Rust work is not-official. (or that's the story as I remember it)
- sametmax 10y ago
  Which is a shame, they are missing an opportunity to ditch C/C++ in favor of a safer language and set a precedent in OS history. Imagine how easier contribution would be if you could write the OS parts with less lines, guarantied to no introduce most security and concurrency bugs we know about.
- techenthusiast 10y ago
  Ah, thanks for clarifying. I updated the article to be more conservative about Rust's inclusion.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

pier25 10y ago

We definitely need a universal OS for all our devices and I really believe Google is in a great position to get us there. It would really surprise me if Apple got there first. Tim lacks vision and will keep on milking iOS even if the iPad Pro is a failure as a laptop replacement. Windows is still king in the desktop space, at least as far a user base goes, but it's terrible on tablets and phones. MS has all the tech in place with UWP, but it's still pretty far in the race in terms of simplicity and usability. Chrome OS ticks all the right boxes, and is experiencing a huge growth, but it's not universal. If Andromeda is real, and it's able to become a universal OS that merges Chrome OS and Android it might be the best thing since sliced bread.

forrestthewoods 10y ago
What? God no. We need competition. A single OS controlled by a single corporation with their own conflicting interests is a million miles from what we need.
supremesaboteur 10y ago
Operating System is about applications. Even if Google comes up with a universal OS there will be many applications that only run on Windows forcing people to continue to use it
- remir 10y ago
  And this is why we need an open source clone of Windows, which is king of the desktop OS. Beside geeks, the average people doesn't care about operating systems, they care about being able to run their apps. It's sad that ReactOS doesn't get more support from the community.
mastazi 10y ago
> Windows [...] [is] terrible on tablets and phones. Surface tablets seem to be doing OK though.
- MBCook 10y ago

techenthusiast 10y ago

Article author here. Posted this in the notes, but possibly too buried: For anyone interested, I intend to write quite often about consumer technology on this blog. Topics will include hardware, software, design, and more. You can follow via RSS or Twitter, and possibly through other platforms soon. Sorry for the self promotion! Thanks for reading. Please do send any corrections or explanations.

roymurdock 10y ago
Wondering what your background is as you state you're not a programmer but you can obviously parse code (at least at a high level) and have familiarity with the OS ecosystem. Market research? Great analysis btw.
- techenthusiast 10y ago
  That's very kind, thank you. And yeah, you guessed right - I was an industry analyst for four years.
markdoubleyou 10y ago
Great first post, hope you keep it up! Only feedback is that I had to reread this sentence several times before I was confident I'd parsed the negations correctly: "I also can’t imagine the Android update problem (a symptom of Linux’s modularity) won’t at last be solved by Andromeda, but one can never be too sure."
- techenthusiast 10y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. I debated that sentence, but you're right - always avoid double negatives. I'll fix it now.
Inconel 10y ago
I have nothing constructive to add aside from that I appreciate the simple uncluttered design of your blog. The typography and glasses logo are very pleasing to my eyes as well. Good luck and I look forward to reading more.

resoluteteeth 10y ago

Is this an actual plan of Google as a company, or is this some sort of Microsoft-style war between divisions where the Chrome team has just decided on its own that the future is based on Chrome and Dart? Also, considering the way that the ARC runtime for Chromebooks was a failure and had to be replaced by a system that apparently essentially runs Android in a container, will it really be possible for a completely different OS to provide reasonable backward compatibility?

pavanky 10y ago
The blog talked about many different things. Not all of them may be related to each other. It is pure speculation from the author.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
I think Google just wants to transition to an OS with a micro-kernel architecture with the smallest possible attack surface. Also, user space drivers should help with the update problems they've always had with Android.
throwawaydbfif 10y ago
I would say that Google is trying to replace JavaScript with dart in any way they possibly can. The reason is simple, JavaScript is an open standard, dart is owned by google. Their reasons that "dart is better" is the typical google koolaid before they attempt a market takeover. As we've seen over and over with Android, chrome, and AMP especially. Google loves to make glass house open source projects you can't touch. You're free to look at how great it is, feel it's well refined curves and admire the finish, but God help you if you don't like how the project is going and want to fork it for yourself. Don't bother trying to commit a new feature to any of Google's software that they don't agree with. It will languish forever. Don't bother forking either, because they'll build a small proprietary bit into it that grows like a tumor until it's impossible to run the "open source" code without it. Fuck dart, I don't care how great it is. Microsoft is being the good one in this case by extending js with typescript, google is trying to upend it into something that they control
- 10y ago

grizzles 10y ago

Since Fuscia is a new kernel, that means it will probably only support Google hardware. The status quo right now among android hardware vendors is to violate the GPL, and they have faced few if any repercussions for doing so. I wonder if Fuscia is sort of viewed as the way forward to addressing that. Anyone care to speculate why there isn't a community version of chromium os? I'd donate to it for sure. It sounds like getting android apps working on it would be pretty easy: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?hl=en#!topic/chromium-os-discuss/OfBln-hl7ug https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?hl=en#!topic...

jakeargent 10y ago
Well, there's Cloudready[1] which is ChromeOS for any computer. I installed it on mom's laptop (ancient device) and it works well. [1]: (https://www.neverware.com/freedownload/ https://www.neverware.com/freedownload/)
bitmapbrother 10y ago
>The status quo right now among android hardware vendors is to violate the GPL No it's not the status quo. The major OEM's do release their code. Yes, there are some Chinese OEM violators, but that's typical of China.
- grizzles 10y ago
  You can release code and still violate the GPL in other ways. For example, there are binary blobs out there and the GPL is pretty unequivocal on this point: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    Releasing binary blobs is definitionally not releasing the source, though.
  - simonh 10y ago
    It depends whether the binary blob is a derived work or not. http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html

wapz 10y ago

I'm a minority I know but I don't like material design because it's terrible at "scaling." It looks great, it's beautiful, but you lose too much damn functionality. When I had to redo apps to material design we had to completely remove multiple buttons due to them not fitting material design standards. I really hope they have some way to alleviate this problem without using 50px icons for all the extra buttons.

ungzd 10y ago
I think this OS will be mostly for entertainment so there's no need for lots of UI, only "Play" and "Pause" buttons.
manmal 10y ago
Why not bend the rules a bit before omitting vital components?
- wapz 10y ago
  They weren't vital components but useful for the user. We moved most of the "excess" buttons to the top bar and overflow menu but still had to remove a button here and there completely (we still had the functionality in a different part of the app it was just more tedious to use from our testing).

akmittal 10y ago

>the main UI API is based on, yes, Dart Won't the Dart's single thread nature be bad to take advantage of Murli core processors? Or they are embracing web workers?

bitmapbrother 10y ago
Dart, in the context of Fuchsia, isn't really a web based language. So yes, it'll take advantage of multi-core processors.
oomkiller 10y ago
Dart supports full concurrency via actor-like Isolates. Currently on the web, you need to use a web worker though, yes. https://lucamezzalira.com/2013/06/11/isolates-how-to-work-with-multithreading-in-dart/ https://lucamezzalira.com/2013/06/11/isolates-how-to-work-wi...

sjtgraham 10y ago

> The pitch will clearly be that developers can write a Flutter app once and have it run on Andromeda, Android, and iOS with minimal extra work, in theory. This is worrying for Apple. I can see the following playing out - Apple continues releasing machines like the TB MBP, much to exasperated developer dismay. - Other x86 laptop industrial design and build quality continue to improve. - Fuchsia/Andromeda itself becomes a compelling development environment - Developers begin switching away from Mac OS to Fuchsia, Linux and Windows - Google delivers on the promise of a WORA runtime and the biggest objective reason not to abandon Mac OS, i.e. writing apps for iOS, disappears. - Apps start to look the same on iOS and Android. iOS becomes less compelling. - iOS devices sales begin to hurt. Granted that the App Store submission requires Mac OS (Application Loader) and the license agreement requires you only use Apple software to submit apps to the App Store and not write your own, but it seems flimsy to rely on that.

untog 10y ago

If nothing else comes out of this, I hope we end up with an Android OS that works better than the current one. I've been running Android since the Nexus One so I'm no newbie to the platform, but the ease with which iOS manages to get all UI interactions at ~unnoticable FPS and outstanding battery life is staggering when you're used to Android. It feels like some really fundamental choices were made badly on the platform that make it incredibly inconsistent and unreliable. A fresh start would be fantastic.

Inconel 10y ago
As a fellow Nexus user, I've owned the Nexus One, 5, and currently use a 6P, how much of this is due to the OS versus hardware? Will Google ever be able to achieve Apple level battery life or overall UI smoothness, not to mention update support, without having their own custom SoC? I was very happy with the 5, even with the intermittent lags, especially considering it's price at release. I suppose I'm not a very heavy phone user, and I never play mobile games, but I've been very happy with the 6P on Android 6.0-7.1. Battery life could definitely be better, and it does get fairly warm at times, but overall it's been a very good experience for me considering the Snapdragon 810 it's using is generally poorly regarded.
- pcnix 10y ago
  Google has been hinting at their own soc for the third gen Pixel devices though, so that is something to look forward to.
- scott_karana 10y ago
  Apple has had fluid UIs since the start, despite off-the-shelf, low resource Samsung SoCs. They only started making custom ones after with the 4S, as I recall.
  - glasz 10y ago
    exactly. it's not (only) a hardware issue.
  - 10y ago

vii 10y ago

It's awesome that Google is doing this and in public too https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ Unfortunately, the hard part of an operating system isn't in a cool API and a rendering demo. It's in integrating the fickle whims of myriad hardware devices with amazingly high expectations of reliability and performance consistency under diverse workloads. People don't like dropped frames when they plug in USB :) Writing device drivers for demanding hardware is much harder than saving registers and switching process context. The Linux kernel has an incredible agglomeration of years of effort and experience behind it - and the social ability to scale to support diverse contributors with different agendas. Microsoft, with its dominant position on the desktop, famously changed the 'preferred' APIs for UI development on a regular cadence. Only Microsoft applications kept up and looked up to date. Now Google has such a commanding share of the phone market - Android is over 80% and growing http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os http://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os - they have a huge temptation to follow suit. Each time that Microsoft introduced a new technology (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundatio... WPF) they had to skirt a fine line between making it simple and making sure that it would be hard for competitors to produce emulation layers for. Otherwise, you could run those apps on your Mac :) There are many things to improve (and simplify) in the Android APIs. It would be delightful to add first class support for C++ and Python, etc. A project this large will be a monster to ship so hopefully we'll soon (a few years) see the main bits integrated into more mainstream platforms like Android/Linux - hopefully without too much ecosystem churn

empath75 10y ago
it doesn't need to be a general purpose OS and is probably going to target mobile devices and laptops. I don't think supporting a wide range of hardware is even on the road map.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
xiaoma 10y ago
Given that it's Google, I wonder if it will support the languages favored by bootstrappers and small startups—Obj C, Ruby, JavaScript and more recently Swift and Elixir. I get the distinct impression that they're heavily optimizing large team productivity and aren't a fan of functional or highly expressive languages. It's too bad, given how much nicer their app approval process, etc is than Apple's that the Android dev experience has been so much worse all these years.

mncharity 10y ago

> I don’t see the average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine allowing for a target higher than 60fps realistically. But... "average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" doesn't describe any of C/C++, Dart, Go, Java, Python, or Rust. Nor Javascript. I get greater than 60 fps with my existing Vive three.js WebVR-ish electron/chromium linux stack. Even on an old laptop with integrated graphics (for very simple scenes). Recent chromium claims 90 fps WebVR, and I've no reason to doubt it. So 60 fps "up to 120fps" seems completely plausible, even on mobile.

saghm 10y ago
> But... "average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" doesn't describe any of C/C++, Dart, Go, Java, Python, or Rust. I'm curious; what would be an example of something you would describe as an "average garbage collected language using a virtual machine"? Java would certainly be the first language I'd think of for that description.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Java is not using a VM on Android since ART was introduced, although on Android 7, it is a bit more complicated, given the mix of pure Assembly interpreter, PGO driven JIT and AOT compiler.
- munificent 10y ago
  > I'm curious; what would be an example of something you would describe as an "average garbage collected language using a virtual machine"? Ruby 1.8, Lua, or CPython.
  - saghm 10y ago
    Python was included in the list of things considered not to be in this category; I probably agree with you on that one, but the idea behind my question was that the languages listed as not "average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" included several that I'd include in that category. What do you think makes Ruby and Lua more "average" than Java?

MarkMc 10y ago

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a limited, buggy way [1]. If Google had put meaningful effort into developing such a strategy we would by now have a relatively simple way to develop software which runs on 99% of laptops and 85% of smartphones and tablets. Developers would now be targeting 'Android first' instead of 'web app first then iOS then maybe Android'. Sundar, if you're reading this - do it! [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/hack-runs-android-apps-on-windows-mac-and-linux-computers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/hack-runs-android-ap...

bitmapbrother 10y ago
The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser.
- foota 10y ago
  Maybe I'm just jaded from downloading video games, but, at least on a landline, I don't think most people would care?
  - ghostly_s 10y ago
    For people who've already committed to Chrome, it might just be a one-time annoyance. But the time when Chrome had an seeming lock on the top seat in the browser wars has come and gone. I can definitely see this hurting new adoption, which would rightly make Google nervous.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    It could make sense as an optional download if you do want Android support. But, Google would never increase the download size of their browser to that extent.

gillianlish 10y ago

guys i hate to tell you this, but it's Feb 15 here in New Zealand, and Google has cancelled Andromeda.

solidsnack9000 10y ago
http://platypusplatypus.com/news/google-andromeda-isnt-happening/ http://platypusplatypus.com/news/google-andromeda-isnt-happe...

thinkloop 10y ago

Why can't the pure web replace apps and programs? All the pieces are almost there: hardware acceleration, service workers, notifications, responsive design... I currently "add to home screen" for most things. I edit my images online, and develop code using cloud9 ide, etc. There are few things I need apps/programs for right now, and that's improving day by day. iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share, but they still have a lot of the wealthy users. There is a non-zero chance they get niched out of prominence by Android (aka every other manufacturer in the world), at which point network effects start encouraging Android-first or Android-only development. There might be a point where Apple needs to double down on the web, and/or maybe kill off apps, like they did flash, to still have the latest "apps".

fredsir 10y ago
Because it's a horrible experience. That's just my anecdotal view, but I have never tried a web based app (electron native app thing or webapp in the browser) that is as great an experience (UX and UI) as the best of the best native apps on Mac and iPhone, and I'm not sure it's possible to push web tech that far without reimplementing everything in the web stack and making it as close to native that we're better off just writing native apps. EDIT: spelling.
- netheril96 10y ago
  > but I have never tried a web based app (electron native app thing or webapp in the browser) that is as great an experience (UX and UI) as the best of the best native apps on Mac and iPhone I would say I have never tried a web based app better than average native apps. (Except for GMail, because I don't like the sync feature of mail clients).
deleted 10y ago
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pjmlp 10y ago
Because it just sucks, browsers were designed for interactive documents, not applications. No HTML5 UI/UX comes close to what is possible to achieve with native APIs in any platform. For old dogs like myself, it always seems that younger web dev generations are rediscovering patterns and features we were already doing in native applications during the 90's. Also solutions like service workers look like some sort of kluge to sort out the problem to do offline applications in browsers. WebOS, ChromeOS (barely used outside US) and FirefoxOS are all proofs that the experience is substandard.

therealmarv 10y ago

This blogpost has waaaay too much assumptions. When reading about this it seems easy to rip out Kernels, OS & Software and put it like a layer on a cake on top of a new OS. Even for Google this is crazy complicated. It will not be that easy. For sure not... and I also see no clear strategy WHY somebody should do that. It's like baking the cake with too much ingredients. ;)

djsumdog 10y ago
I can see the kernel thing happening. Just the licensing and breaking ABI is one of the biggest factors in not being able to have an easily upgradable android. I only see this as a good thing if this ensures an easier upgrade path than in Android; and if vendor ROMs can easily be replaced by a stock OS (like on Windows).
- therealmarv 10y ago
  I definitely can not see the Kernel thing happen. Ever thought of power management and keeping the whole system fluent? This are all not easy problems which you solve in 1 or 2 years. It may only work for very specialized hardware... speaking of hardware. Hardware driver support is also something most other Kernels suffer from in comparison to e.g. Linux.
  - Roy0 10y ago
    > Hardware driver support is also something most other Kernels suffer from in comparison to e.g. Linux. So? Google doesn't have to support all hardware, they can pick to support only the hardware they want. That's what they already do with ChromeOS. Installing ChromiumOS on unsupported hardware can have its issues. The reverse is true too, installing not-ChromeOS Linux or another OS on Chromebook does not always work well, although it's fine on some specific models. Android is like that too, and in a much worse way than for Chromebooks. We're not talking about stellar linux kernel support for all the custom ARM SOC that are out there. All manufacturers write their own closed source hardware support for android and this is how android ends up having issues with updating, since whenever Google updates the linux kernel it breaks the ABI and all the support manufacturers wrote for the previous version, and manufacturers do not want to spend so much time on needless busywork such as keeping up with kernel API churn that exists just to satisfy the dev team sense of perfection.

junk_disposal 10y ago

When this takes off, how hard will it be to install custom roms? One of the great things about Android is that Linux is GPL, so at least the kernel code is open.

camdenlock 10y ago

This could be the first time Apple needs to truly worry about Google. The one massive lead Apple still has over Google (and the other major players) is the incredible OS they inherited back in 1997 and continue to extend and maintain today. Neither Android nor Windows nor Chrome OS nor your favorite Linux distro have ever been able to truly compete with the NeXT legacy as it lives on in Apple. Google is smart enough as a whole to see this, and so it's not surprising that they're attempting to shore up their platform's competence in this particular area. What IS surprising is that it has taken them this long. Perhaps what's truly surprising is just how much mileage Apple has gotten out of NeXT. It's astounding, and I know Apple realizes this, but I question whether or not they know how to take the next step, whatever that may be. And if Google manages to finally catch up...

hota_mazi 10y ago
> This could be the first time Apple needs to truly worry about Google. Er... what? Apple has been worried, and actually threatened, by Google every day since 2008, when the first version of Android came out. Without Android, Apple would probably have a 90% monopoly on mobile phones today. Saying they might be "worried" is beyond an understatement. They are absolutely furious at Google, as Jobs was until he passed away.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Android's global market share, even with Apple, is 85%. Bear in mind, the iPhone is only popular in the US, which is responsible for most of the remaining 15%. Outside the US, Android is a completely unquestioned monopoly.
  - hota_mazi 10y ago
    You seem to be responding to a different post than mine.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      You know, I think on the second to last line on your comment, I transposed Apple and Android or something like that. :/

lenkite 10y ago

AFAIK the flutter UI framework is a react-like framework written in Dart (with C++ as OS glue) including the UI -> graphics rendering layer. It builds upon Skia and Blink. I am not sure how that will allow compatibility with other languages. The only language for UI apps looks to be Dart. Which isn't bad - its a pretty well designed language, but I don't see how apps can be written in a wide variety of language as the author suggests.

junk_disposal 10y ago

From a developer's point of view, on one hand, I like this idea. Just about any development environment is better than Android: 1. Callbacks are horrendous. I hate inner classes, they're ugly and unwieldy. I'd honestly rather something like AWT's (Yes, that 90s tech) callbacks over inner classes. Just have a main function with a large switch. It's much easier to reason that then the current mess-up of trying to figure out your app's lifecycle. 2. Inter-thread communication is horrendous. Android is Java based, so can I pass classes? No. Only Strings. And even that is horrendously ugly. 3. It's a Frankenstein model. It's a Desktop OS like process/file model, but not everything is a file. Now they suggest opening using the new file-picker. But in many ways files are easier to use. 4. They add new libraries (Material Design, for example) which no one will ever use, because everyone needs to use appcompat. And even in five years, when Lollipop will be like Android 2.2 is now, everyone will still have to use appcompat to get Android Z libraries on Android O, or something. And by the way, now most apps rely on appcompat-7 which relies on appcompat-4. 5. Many classes are broken - Take TextView. You can style it with HTML, but only a small subset (so you can't use it as a WebView). So it's not meant as a "web browser" replacement. But it can parse broken HTML. Wow, so developed. But you can't style a link color, or change underline color. ------------ But on the other hand, I'd find it horribly annoying (and I think that many others would feel the same way) having to rewrite everything from scratch into Dart or whatever.

avmich 10y ago

I didn't see in the article explanations why those decisions were taken and not others. On the surface it feels like this is an OS insufficiently different from others to justify switching to.

am185 10y ago

wow! it supports Golang, since it has glsl, this will have nice UI. https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:third_party/go https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:third_pa...

maheart 10y ago

How credible is this source? I don't understand half the decisions outlined in the article. > I also have to imagine the Android update problem (a symptom of Linux’s modularity) I seriously doubt the Linux kernel is anything but a minor contributor to Android's update problem. Handset developers make their money by selling physical phones. In two years, your average consumer probably doesn't care if their device is still receiving software updates. They'll jump onto a new phone plan, with a fresh, cool new mobile, with a better screen, newer software (features!), and a refreshed battery. Maintaining existing software for customers costs handset manufacturers $$$, and disincentives consumers purchasing new phones (their cash cow). The money is probably better spent (from their POV) on new features, and a marketing budget.

felixge 10y ago
> In two years, your average consumer probably doesn't care if their device is still receiving software updates. They'll jump onto a new phone plan, with a fresh, cool new mobile, with a better screen, newer software (features!), and a refreshed battery. This might be true for the US, where 75% of subscribers are on post-paid (contracts). It's not true for the rest of the world. * Europe: < 50% post-paid * Rest of the world: < 22% post-paid I'd also argue that Android users will be more likely to be pre-paid than post-paid customers (compared to iPhone users) in all of these regions, but I have no data to back it up. Anyway, I agree that it's probably not very profitable, if at all, for android handset makers to support their devices for > 2 years. But I think many customers would benefit from it ... [1] http://www.globalrewardsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/GRS-Mobile-Top-up_Wireless-Market-Statistics-2015.pdf http://www.globalrewardsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/GRS-...
- ianai 10y ago
  I think the "post paid" connection leading to a 2 year lifecycle is suspect. There's a big after market repair industry in the US. Many people have a singular cell phone as their internet device - and it's often ancient by IT terms. 2+ year old hardware needs to be getting software/OS upgrades.
  - 10y ago

conradev 10y ago

Here is a link to the documentation: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/master/docs https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/master/docs

mankash666 10y ago

I hope the userland is POSIX/Linux compliant. There's a TON of useful software reliant on this compliance that will go to waste if it isn't compliant out-of-the-box.

pjmlp 10y ago
It doesn't seem to affect ChromeOS, iOS or Android.

conradev 10y ago

The drivers-wifi repository contains a stub for a Qualcomm QCA6174 driver[1] which is found in the Nexus 5X[2], OnePlus 2[3] and meant for smartphones[4]. The drivers-gpu-msd-intel-gen repository contains drivers for Intel 8th and 9th gen integrated graphics[5]. I think it's fair to propose that Google plans on running Fuchsia on both smartphones and laptops… [1] https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/drivers-wifi/blob/master/qualcomm/driver.cc https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/drivers-wifi/blob/master/q... [2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+5X+Teardown/51318#s112148 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nexus+5X+Teardown/51318#s112... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/OnePlus+2+Teardown/45352#s100455 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/OnePlus+2+Teardown/45352#s10... [4] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7921/qualcomm-announces-mumimo-80211ac-family-increasing-the-efficiency-of-80211ac-networks http://www.anandtech.com/show/7921/qualcomm-announces-mumimo... [5] https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/drivers-gpu-msd-intel-gen/blob/master/src/device_id.h https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/drivers-gpu-msd-intel-gen/...

chatman 10y ago

Microsoft is opening up more and more, and Google is closing down more and more.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago

The article says it's a microkernel, I wonder if it will be a more secure general purpose OS, well windows NT started as microkernel but they changed that wit NT 4,let's see if it will be different. I also wonder about driver support and battery consumption. Good luck to Google.

diebir 10y ago

Quote: "I am not a programmer, so if anything stated above is incorrect, please, please send me corrections. I would also greatly appreciate any clarifying comments, which were one of my primary motivations for writing this piece." Essentially a bunch of nonsense, in other words.

mtgx 10y ago

It would be a real shame if Google wasted this once in a decade or perhaps once in multiple decades opportunity to not have an OS written in a language other than C++. Also, it would be mind-boggling if they didn't actually fix the update problem this time, and if it wasn't a top 3 priority for the new OS.

frozenport 10y ago
It's written in C. There is little beyond syntax that a different language can offer because a modern OS cannot afford features like garbage collection. Indeed, this was one of the research aims of MS's Singularity project.
- sametmax 10y ago
  They could have written it in Rust. No garbage collection, more security guaranties. Easier to contribute to the code properly.
  - frozenport 10y ago
    Rust performed 3x slower and hacking around the language made it somewhat of a mess [1]. Much like Singularity, this is hardly a success story. Although Singularity was interesting from a research perspective nobody doubted that an OS could be written in Rust. https://scialex.github.io/reenix.pdf https://scialex.github.io/reenix.pdf
    - steveklabnik 10y ago
      That paper is very old, before Rust 1.0. There was also a lot of discussions about ways that they could have used Rust better at the time, IIRC. Today, there is no reason Rust should ever be 3x slower, especially in an OSdev context, where you currently have to use nightly.
pathsjs 10y ago
Too many negations, I can't parse. Do you want an OS written in C++ or not? :-)

bsaul 10y ago

Trying to see the other side of the coin : what economical reason is there for this project ? A company the side of Google, with all its internal politics, doesn't work as a startup. Starting a third operating system project and hoping it to replace two major ones means convincing people inside the company to loose part of their influence. Now it may happen if chrome or android were failing, but they're clearly not.

bitL 10y ago

Seems like Free Software that propelled early Internet pioneers served its purpose and those companies are turning their backs on it - first with Apple, GCC->LLVM, now with Google, Linux->Fuchsia :( I am getting afraid of another dark age on the horizon... I guess it's going to be inevitable as 90% of SW developers will find themselves redundant when inferring AI capable of composing code blocks and listening to/reading speech/specifications arrives in upcoming decade, making creation of typical web/mobile apps trivial.

michaelmrose 10y ago
This is either fantastic satire or hopelessly optimistic. What you are describing is a human level artificial general intelligence. Probably more than 10 years out.
- bitL 10y ago
  Not really, for simple apps you can use what we already have in place with some meta-programming rules prepared by humans (currently only a few companies posses this capability though). You can use ML like deep learning variations to learn association between your wishes and corresponding code blocks. Initially apps like that would be simple, i.e. "make a web page", done, "change background color to pink gradient", done, "place gallery of images from my vacation to the center", done, "show me the photos", "remove this one", "make this one smaller", done, "add this title", "add my paintings underneath", "add a buybox next to my paintings", add "checkout to the top" etc. NLP is now there already, but initially you'd need a lot of human "drones" for associating "wishes" with code - doable by companies like Google (they can bake in learning into Android Studio) or by scanning GitHub etc. We already have stupid mobile apps generators, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't have what I described within next 10 years.
  - fauigerzigerk 10y ago
    Sounds like something that could be used for customizing a CMS a little bit, but software development is something very different from what you're describing. Developing software requires understanding of completely open ended natural language. NLP is nowhere near that level of AI and doubt that it will be in the next 30 years.

michaelmrose 10y ago

It was unfortunately obvious that the writer had insufficient tech chops when use the phrase "a post-API programming model" But pressing on how somehow manages to blame the lack of updates to android phones on the modularity of the Linux kernel. The joke of course being that linux is monolithic and googles new OS is a microkernel ergo more modular. The quote is "...however. I also have to imagine the Android update problem (a symptom of Linux’s modularity) will at last be solved by Andromeda" Its hilarious that he can somehow defying all sanity ascribe androids update issue to an imagined defect in Linux. Android phones don't get updated because for the manufacturers ensuring their pile of hacks works with a newer version of android would represent a non trivial amount of work for the oem whom already has your money. The only way they can get more of your money is to sell you a new phone which they hope to do between 1-2 years from now. In short offering an update for your current hardware would simultaneously annoy some users who fear change, add little to those who plan to upgrade to a new model anyway, decrease the chance that a minority would upgrade, and cost them money to implement. Its not merely not a flaw in the underlying linux kernel its not a technical issue at all.

bjarneh 10y ago
> would represent a non trivial amount of work for the oem whom already has your money This is it; unless crucial apps (or some other necessity) only work with a newer Android version (which could push OEM's to update) they never will. Much better for OEM's to hope that you'll "update Android" through the purchase of a new phone.
- coredog64 10y ago
  The carriers bear some blame as well. Apple negotiated for the right to upgrade the OS without carrier review, but most Android device OEMs don't. So the carriers drag their feet as well, hoping you'll buy that new device from them and be locked in for another 2 years.
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
>The only way they can get more of your money is to sell you a new phone which they hope to do between 1-2 years from now. Right, but they will never get my money if they don't deliver timely OS updates for the old model. You're right of course that this issue has absolutely zero to do with Linux.

Insanity 10y ago

> IDEs written in Java are wildly slow… My favourite IDE to use today is IntelliJ, and I prefer it over my experience with Visual Studio (though to be fair, I did not use VS intensively in the past 3-4 years). I don't experience IntelliJ as "slow". It launches faster than VS did when I used it, and once it is running I keep it open pretty much the entire work-week without any issues.

pjmlp 10y ago
Other than Netbeans and Eclipse being faster and don't turn my dual core into airplane mode like Android Studio does, which forced me to enable laptop mode on it.
- Insanity 10y ago
  I don't really understand what you are trying to say, sorry :/
mcroft 10y ago
It's an odd statement to make, given that he states he's not a programmer in the notes.
msgilligan 10y ago
There are steps in the Android tool chain build process that are slow (i.e. much slower than pure Java build) but IntelliJ/AS platform IDE is plenty fast on my (admittedly top-of-the-line) 2012 MacBook Pro.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

HNLogInShit 10y ago

Sounds like a mess.

xtat 10y ago

Honestly I'd rather keep the linux and ditch the JVM

BrailleHunting 10y ago

NIH syndrome plus large organization people looking for job security, and rough, fat FLOSS full of maintenance and security vulns hell equals "Emperor's new clothes."

endorphone 10y ago

Conjecture is fun, but the linked piece takes some enormous liberties with crossing massive chasms effortlessly. Not only is Fushia not Andromeda (a project), the needs of IoT is massively different from the needs of Android. And the net investment in Android is absolutely colossal, and making some new APIs or a microkernel does not a replacement make.

dep_b 10y ago

So in the near future billions of devices will no longer be running Linux anymore? That would be quite a blow to the OS in terms of chances of dominating operating systems that are being used by end users. Or will they simply fork it and strip it down until only the parts they really like will remain?

atoponce 10y ago
This is also a concern of mine. What will this mean for rooting devices? Will it still be root, or will it be "root" as it an iOS jailbreak?

sametmax 10y ago

Google could have taken firefox and improve it to make it better, but they created something new. Now instead of improving the linux stack and the gnu stack (the kernel, wayland, the buses, the drivers), they rewrite everything. They put millions into this. Imagine what could have been done with it on existing software. They say they are good citizen in the FOSS world, but eventually they just use the label to promote their product. They don't want free software, they want their software, that they control, and let you freely work on it.

discordianfish 10y ago
Everybody's modern linux stack is built on 40 year old design and assumption. While it's remarkable how well these work so many years later, I welcome that somebody like Google tries something new.
geodel 10y ago
> Google could have taken firefox and improve it to make it better, but they created something new. This does not work. They were initially working on webkit but technical decisions they wanted were different from apple/webkit team so they had to fork. It is much better they implement their technical ideas with their resources.
lossolo 10y ago
Isn't Google paying to Mozilla for Google searches from inside search bar in Firefox ? Isn't like main money flow for Mozilla? More people use Chrome, more money Google saves. It's all about the data, making Firefox better didn't benefit Google as good as creating new browser. Now they do not have to pay so much for all their users searches to other companies and they have so much more data that they can use internally for other products.
- teddyh 10y ago
  No, that ended in 2014. Google no longer gives Mozilla anything.

kzrdude 10y ago

Does anyone have a more detailed explanation of the component called “modular”?

iainmerrick 10y ago

"Fuchsia" and "magenta" are pretty gutsy names to choose, given how similar it sound to Apple's vaporware "Pink" OS from the 90s (AKA Taligent, AKA Copland). Somebody has a sense of humor! It's really hard to tell if this is actually something that will ship, or yet another Google boondoggle to be swiftly discarded (like the first attempt at ChromeOS for tablets). Google under Larry Page built and discarded a lot of stuff; I wonder if it's the same under Sundar Pichai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Sounds like a stretch having to go all the way back to the 90's to get a similar color code name.
- iainmerrick 10y ago
  It was the first thing those unusual names made me think of. But I'm a long-time Mac developer, so probably pink and purple colors as OS names won't have the same connotations for other people.

ungzd 10y ago

I think it's intended for entertainment and content consumption just like Android and Chrome OS. And Apple is trying the same with merging iOS and desktop. How long it will take until all computers will be set-top boxes where you can only netflix and chill and if you want, for example, to draw something, you have to buy Professional Grade Computer for $50000?

Nypro 10y ago

So Google is going with a DartVM on this one. Dart is cool and all, but why DartVM? It's the same restrictive model we have with Android (dalvikVM) where you can only develop with languages that can compile down to Java bytecode. In this case, however, we will be using languages that can transpile to Dart source instead! Why not JavaScript engine? With the current movement with WebAssembly, I see a lot potential use cases. The biggest point being the ability to code in any language that compiles to wasm. The engine could be exposed to communicate with the OS directly or sth. If they are going to consider V8 alongside DartVM, then that would be cool. I truly hope they don't repeat old mistakes.

thwd 10y ago
Dart can compile to JS, so that edge is covered. Dart bytecode is arguably an easier target for other language compilers than, say, assembly. The DartVM's byte code is fully specified, there is some adoption, it's openly accessible, and there's a bold, production-ready reference implementation. For wasm, only half of that is true.
- sp332 10y ago
  Compiling Dart to JS is a very different problem than compiling JS or other languages to Dart.
  - thwd 10y ago
    I understand what you mean and agree. But then, you don't need to compile JS into Dart. Rather, JS into DartVM byte code.
munificent 10y ago
> Why not JavaScript engine? Having your bottom level language semantics be dynamically typed seems to place a real cap on application performance. Given that the underlying machine code is typed, I don't think it makes sense for the lowest level language you can target to be dynamically typed. (WebAssembly is basically an acknowledgement of that fact.) > The biggest point being the ability to code in any language that compiles to wasm. Conversely, I don't think WASM is a great target language either. It doesn't include GC, and I don't think it makes sense for each application to have to ship its own GC and runtime. WASM is a good target for C/C++, but not for higher level languages like Java/C#/JS/Python/Ruby/Dart. They say they intend to support GC, but they've been saying that for a while and I haven't seen much motion yet. I don't think Fuchsia can afford to wait around for that.

Flenser 10y ago

ANDROid + chROME + DArt = ANDROMEDA?

shams93 10y ago

As a sound/music app person the inclusion of ASIO for audio is exciting, Google's new is should be on par with iOS for sound with ASIO audio drivers at the core.

techenthusiast 10y ago

I updated the article with the following clarification at the top: I use Andromeda equivalently with Fuchsia in this article. Andromeda could refer to combining Android and Chrome OS in general, but it's all the same OS for phones, laptops, etc. - Fuchsia. I make no claims about what the final marketing names will be. Andromeda could simply be the first version of Fuchsia, and conveniently starts with "A." Google could also market the PC OS with a different name than for the mobile OS, or any number of alternatives. I have no idea. We'll see.

HiroP55 10y ago

The comment about Java based IDEs being slow is not entirely objective and fact based. I'd say it's more of an emotional argument.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png