In August last year, the operating system Fuchsia got a little more in the spotlight: Google is working in the form of Fuchsia on a new operating system for mobile devices. Fuchsia will be open source again. However, we still do not know what Google is up to. At least some pictures of the user interface are already there. Incidentally, unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux, but on a new kernel called Magenta.
Google should change accordingly the license conditions and say goodbye to GPL. Instead, Fuchsia will mix BSD 3, MIT, and Apache 2.0. According to Google, with Fuchsia or the Magenta kernel, “modern smartphones and modern PCs with fast processors, sufficient RAM, possibly peripherals and the goal of executing open-end computation ” are to be targeted. Whether Google intends in the long term to place Fuchsia as an alternative or even a replacement for Android, is currently completely open.
Interface and apps for Fuchsia are created using Google’s Flutter SDK, which provides code that would theoretically work on both Android and iOS. The surface again runs currently under the name Armadillo. As the Fuchsia code runs on Android thanks to Flutter, you can currently package the interface in an APK and get it running on Android. However, it currently works only a little and the program is basically shimmied from one placeholder to the next.
The home screen at Fuchsia is currently only a large, vertically scrollable list. In the middle of the profile picture of each user is to showcase and to date details and whereabouts. Then there are areas for recently used apps and suggestions for the user. To get to a kind of quick menu by tapping your own profile picture (see screenshot above).
Under the motto “Story” then collect individual cards that should subordinate to all specific purposes. In essence, they appear to be commonly used apps bundled by category. The maps can also be moved and open apps in the split-screen. Apparently, the distribution can be made somewhat variable and several apps are combined in different proportions.
Google is now also using a new dark theme for the keyboard. In addition, Google Now is already prominently represented in Fuchsia. Everything seems to be very unfinished and experimental. Therefore, it is also unclear whether Google will now invest plenty of energy in Fuchsia or the project may be filed in a few months to the files. In any case, Fuchsia developer Travis Geiselbrecht has confirmed that the project will be taken very seriously.
Fuchsia will be much more modern in its base than Android, and will certainly provide some performance benefits. The effort to establish the operating system on a large area would of course be anything but without. But maybe Flutter could help to maintain compatibility here. All this should probably be years away anyway because today and tomorrow Fuchsia is not in for a big debut. So it will remain exciting for a while until Google reveals more about its plans for the new OS.
