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> Easily the most ambitious of these is a clear intention for some Fuchsia devices to be able to run apps from other operating systems like Android and Linux.

> Easily the most ambitious of these is a clear intention for some Fuchsia devices to be able to run apps from other operating systems like Android and Linux. This line is hilarious to me because when SV learned that HarmonyOS could run Android OS/apps, the common refrain was "HarmonyOS is a literal android clone!!!" But when a SV corp does it, it's "ambitious". And one can only imagine the hagiographics if Apple was the one running Android apps natively on iOS... SV needs some deep, deep introspection if it is ever going to get ahead of the curve again.

jeroenhd 4y ago
The difference is that the HarmonyOS API was just a fork of Android, even if the underlying system changed (and it wasn't changed that much). Fuchsia is completely different, from the kernel all the way to the API. The end result isn't what's ambitious. Linux can do this today, and run Windows applications at the same time. What's ambitious is getting different APIs to work together well on a system that's designed radically differently. The overlap lies in Flutter (the "we'll ship our own GUI toolkit with the application code" approach), not in the underlying framework. I imagine Apple could quite easily get Android apps to work on iOS if it wanted to. They need a wrapper for Linux calls, which they can borrow from Google in this case, and they need part of the Android framework, which can be made to run on the wrapper. It wouldn't take more than a year for the first proof of concepts to come out, I'd reckon. Apple just has no reason to want to run Android apps because they're not the ones that are in desperate need of market share like HarmonyOS.
phh 4y ago
Except that HarmonyOS (for smartphones) is actually bog standard Linux/Android? While in this case, they are rewriting the kernel (but I agree that it looks like it'll remain normal Android for the upper layers)

jeroenhd 4y ago

The difference is that the HarmonyOS API was just a fork of Android, even if the underlying system changed (and it wasn't changed that much). Fuchsia is completely different, from the kernel all the way to the API. The end result isn't what's ambitious. Linux can do this today, and run Windows applications at the same time. What's ambitious is getting different APIs to work together well on a system that's designed radically differently. The overlap lies in Flutter (the "we'll ship our own GUI toolkit with the application code" approach), not in the underlying framework. I imagine Apple could quite easily get Android apps to work on iOS if it wanted to. They need a wrapper for Linux calls, which they can borrow from Google in this case, and they need part of the Android framework, which can be made to run on the wrapper. It wouldn't take more than a year for the first proof of concepts to come out, I'd reckon. Apple just has no reason to want to run Android apps because they're not the ones that are in desperate need of market share like HarmonyOS.

phh 4y ago

Except that HarmonyOS (for smartphones) is actually bog standard Linux/Android? While in this case, they are rewriting the kernel (but I agree that it looks like it'll remain normal Android for the upper layers)