> It's very different from "a bogus project for the sole purpose of retaining some engineers" that OP theorized.
I mean, it's not like Google is inventing bogus projects in a top-down sense, with some middle-manager somewhere coming up with "private works projects" and staffing them with engineers Google wants to keep. Nobody is claiming that.
No, what the GP was proposing is that the projects are bogus in a bottom-up sense: they're projects that are entirely useless to Google's shareholders in both a short-term and long-term sense, but which the engineers really want to work on, and which at least aren't actively harming Google (or perhaps they are, but not as much as Google would be harmed if the same project were developed in the wild.) This is very different from "basic research" (Google X et al), which is useless in a short-term sense, but may yield large positive returns later on. These projects are bogus because the best-case scenario for them is no net effect on Google as a business. (They might have quite an effect on the the world, but if there's no way for Google to convert that effect into shareholder value: bogus.)
Fuchsia is a perfect case: at best, it replaces Android, for no net benefit to Google (since they already dominate the mobile ecosystem with Android.) But if the engineers working on Fuchsia couldn't work on it at Google, they'd have started a similar project outside Google... and then Google would be in the position of a non-Google-owned OS displacing Android's share of the mobile-OS market.
Much better that these engineers do something useless [from a business perspective] that merely keeps stable Google's share of a market, than that they do something that actively lowers Google's share of a market.
>Which is expected for their own funded project that's still under active development which they've explicitly decided against publicizing what its strategic purpose or intentions are for it.
Sure, the OP's question was what's bad about it. That's bad.
>You can re-asses the merits of the project after they've released it
There would be no merits. It's an OS. Who would write the thousands of drivers and layers for various purposes. If there will be no community, there would be no decent OS.
And no, google doesn't invest enough in it. It's either you hire a dev team of thousands people, as Microsoft does, or draw the community. Google did neither so far, and so Fuchsia has fewer drivers than Haiku. Most they want it to be a system working on a few selected phones, or maybe google doesn't even consider it seriously, and it's an initiative of a small group of enthusiasts within google.
> Fuchsia's goal is to power production devices and products used for business-critical applications. As such, Fuchsia is not a playground for experimental operating system concepts. Instead, the platform roadmap is driven by practical use cases arising from partner and product needs.
> Was Google's plan to replace Android with Fuchsia?
I think the idea was that Fuchsia might replace Linux (so Android, ChromeOS, and various other OS things at Google would have a dependency on Fuchsia, instead of having a dependency on Linux)
But that seems unlikely now.
I think Fuchsia is pretty much dead, unless someone outside of Google starts using Fuchsia for something (e.g. Facebook almost used Fuchsia a few years ago)
> They have been working on Fuscia forever and no signs of shipping, one of many projects that seem to be designed to entertain very expensive talent to keep them busy.
Please. Fuchsia has already launched and is in production devices. [0] At least get the spelling right as well as the fact that it has shipped.
I have not seen anyone else create a production-level OS from scratch in less than 7 years and release it on to real world devices other than Google and have it run the full Chrome browser in that same time period. [1]
It is as almost as if that they are planning to replace something inside ChromeOS, or even Android...
> Was Google's plan to replace Android with Fuchsia?
One of the oddities of BigCo and diffusion of responsibility / abdication of intent is, I'm not sure there's one single person who could accurately answer this.
I hate coming out and saying it because I'm a xoogler, and I'm worried people will think I'm breaking new territory by saying this, but it's known outside Google at this point: no. Never say never, but, it's as close to no as you can get.
Given:
- Nest Hubs were/are the only shipping Fuchsia product and are de facto deprecated for Pixel tablet
- Assistant is de facto deprecated for Gemini (Assistant was responsible for Nest Hub's UI, which hasn't seen even minor updates in years)
- what I see occurring on Google's Blind re: multiple Chrome OS engineers confirming they were told to chill out and wait for reprioritization, and a handful expressing it is dead and they're expecting to be transferred to Android desktop work
- Flutter and Fuchsia have both been reported to have firings, whereas Android has had none reported.
- Hiroshi Lockheimer left recently, so now the hardware head owns Android/Chrome OS/Fuchsia.
This all plays along well with what Sundar spends his time on and drags on, and on, and on: about efficiency and focus, meaning, please cull 5-10% of your workers yearly and you're not getting new headcount soon if ever. Because profit margins because Wall Street.
Thus, it looks like a hard decision by a genius leader to turn Assistant, Chrome OS, and Fuchsia into ghost towns staffed by a skeleton crew and reallocate headcount to keeping Android untouched/growing.
I'd be very surprised if Fuchsia ever shipped on anything new Google sells other than things clearly too resource-constrained for Android (speakers and non-ARM chips, i.e nest hubs)
IMO they are aiming to replace Android with Fuchsia. Because they have full control of Fuchsia, and so-so control of Android. They don't need to sell Android. They can just let it die on its own in AOSP which is already nonviable without Google's services.
> Another Google project that will end up being abandoned
This one however will give Google full control of the devices it runs on (no more Linux kernel related obligations), so they have zero incentives to kill it, unless they write something else that does the same things.
Google will rather abandon Android a few years after Fuchsia is launched.
> If they try to pull that off, all their partners will drop them like a hot potato.
At that point, will they have a choice? I mean most partners already bow to Google's control over AOSP -- if they said tomorrow that android was actually switching to run on top of fuchsia (let's say they did all the work to make it happen, so it was "seamless"), everyone would just be like... "ok".
While I'm not sure I necessarily want Fuchsia to fail, I'm 100% with you on it being likely better for the world if google didn't own everything...
> they could have already replaced Android with ChromeOS for quite some time now.
ChromeOS is only partly their platform. They don't really maintain control over it. Because, like the iphone 1, it's web. It's a shared platform.
Also, why just escape Java when you can escape the GPL Linux kernel too!! Bonus!
Fuchsia OS really is an existential hedge, a fallback position unlike all else. I still am willing to guess though that it was argued & sold on it's technics. If anything, allowing good engineers a great attractive project: that's what it takes to attract & retain talent in the competitive tech world, giving some of your engineers really wild greenfield chances. Ideally in a highly visible manner. But a capabilities based OS free from Java, free from GPL: it's a good corporate-safe technically-strong starting point to "organize the world's information, make it accessible and useful" (yet secure).
> many Android devices and apps are useless without Google's proprietary services.
And not, in fact, open source. Due to the non-GPL license, every single Android device out there is effectively running a closed-source fork of AOSP.
I had an old Samsung device automatically install TikTok when I powered it on after sitting in a drawer for years. TikTok didn't even exist when I bought the phone, yet someone with more control over my device than me sold the remote access (they gave themselves, without my consent) to TikTok.
Of course this is not a new development, but the proprietary BS and Google's increasingly evil actions over the past decade really highlight how much of a problem that is. Trusting Fuchsia is just repeating that mistake.
From the outside looking in I thought the security model could really help Google lower splash radius from zero days? The feature-set certainly sounds appealing just reading the marketing blurb. [1]
With any luck in the next iteration Google will create a Fuschia ISO or VMDK so people who want to give it a spin without building it can quickly get a taste of the environment. The fact you can at least run it in an emulator is definitely a step up from requiring dedicated hardware, which was the previous process. [2]
> I am totally against Google and its restrictions and tracking proprietary code in Android but this project looks more like an attempt to get user base to sell them some paid services later.
KDE e.V. is a non-profit, so I don't think they could legally even do that...
I doubt GP's claim is correct, but that article is terrible. Those counts are any contributors to repos in an org, not number of contributors from those orgs. And you can see the immediate problem with using orgs when you see both Google and Angular are in the top 10.
> I imagine e.g. Samsung might have some hesitations about being even more dependent on Google as a supplier.
Does it make them more dependent? Google is effectively the only upstream for Android, and Fuchsia is open source, so it seems like it should be the same?
>Why are they developing so many different mobile OS platforms at the same company ?
As the title say , Google is just investing in it. They don't develop the codebase of the OS.
They want to push their free services to collect data , it's their business model after all.
Also it's designed for emerging market , KaiOS phone don't have touch screen, they are supposed to be super lightweight, as a matter of fact they already have a billion users which I personally found to be insane for a startup I've never heard of.
> here are abundant reasons why Google would want a non-Linux operating system internally.
You may be in the right, but I personally don't see no reason for it. Linux is the best supported operating system in the world and Google always has the option to alter the OS if need be.
I do believe Fuchsia is vastly more secure and stabler than Linux, which could be a benefit, but Google isn't exactly being pilfered by miscreants on a daily basis, so that benefit is in doubt.
I mean, it's not like Google is inventing bogus projects in a top-down sense, with some middle-manager somewhere coming up with "private works projects" and staffing them with engineers Google wants to keep. Nobody is claiming that.
No, what the GP was proposing is that the projects are bogus in a bottom-up sense: they're projects that are entirely useless to Google's shareholders in both a short-term and long-term sense, but which the engineers really want to work on, and which at least aren't actively harming Google (or perhaps they are, but not as much as Google would be harmed if the same project were developed in the wild.) This is very different from "basic research" (Google X et al), which is useless in a short-term sense, but may yield large positive returns later on. These projects are bogus because the best-case scenario for them is no net effect on Google as a business. (They might have quite an effect on the the world, but if there's no way for Google to convert that effect into shareholder value: bogus.)
Fuchsia is a perfect case: at best, it replaces Android, for no net benefit to Google (since they already dominate the mobile ecosystem with Android.) But if the engineers working on Fuchsia couldn't work on it at Google, they'd have started a similar project outside Google... and then Google would be in the position of a non-Google-owned OS displacing Android's share of the mobile-OS market.
Much better that these engineers do something useless [from a business perspective] that merely keeps stable Google's share of a market, than that they do something that actively lowers Google's share of a market.
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