Google Fuchsia OS gets serious, development opened to the public

JC Torres - Dec 8, 2020, 7:21pm CST
Google Fuchsia OS gets serious, development opened to the public

Google has quite a few platforms under its care like Android, Chrome OS, and customized variants of those. For the longest time, pundits have been waiting for Google to finally come with its own operating system, whether it’s just Android or, more likely, just Chrome OS. For some time, it seemed that Fuchsia would be that long-awaited Google OS, at least until it silently retreated into the background. Now Google is pushing Fuchsia OS back into the spotlight, explaining the project’s purpose and letting others outside the company shape its future.

Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia isn’t built on top of Linux or an existing kernel. It is pretty much built from the ground up using modern technologies and concepts. Although there was a burst of interest in Fuchsia OS back when it was first made public, that has somewhat mellowed down as the project took on a more experimental character, feeling more like a playground than something intended to play with older and bigger operating systems.

Google is now trying to dispel that notion and is ramping up the development of the OS. While it remains the primary author of Fuchsia, it is now opening up more parts of the OS’s development to the public. Interested developers can take a peek at the open source project’s bug tracker, for example, and can even submit patches.

Google also made public the project’s roadmap to prove that it isn’t simply a skunkworks endeavor. Interestingly, a lot of it involves a “version 2” of the operating system’s major components, indicating that the current state of the project is far from the form that Google has envisioned for it.

Although it definitely still has an air of being an experimental and novel project, Fuchsia is intended to be a new operating system that will eventually be used on production devices and even critical systems. Of course, even with something like Google’s expertise, it still has a long way to go before it even becomes ready to replace Android and Chrome OS as the one Google OS to rule them all.

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