Google’s “Fuchsia” smartphone OS dumps Linux, has a wild new UI | Ars Technica

Also see Google’s mysterious new Fuchsia OS has a UI now (The Verge)

"Fuchsia really seems like a project that asks "how would we design Android today, if we could start over?" It's a brand-new, Google-developed kernel running a brand-new, Google-developed SDK that uses a brand-new, Google-developed programming language and it's all geared to run Google's Material Design interface as quickly as possible. Google gets to dump Linux and the GPL, it can dump Java and the problems it caused with Oracle, and Google can basically insulate itself from all of Android's upstream projects and bring all the development in-house. Doing such a thing on the scale of Android today would be a massive project.

The hardest part might not even be developing the OS, but coming up with some kind of transition plan from Android, which has grown to be the world's most popular operating system. The "cross platform" feature of the Flutter SDK sounds important for a transition plan. If Google could get developers to start writing apps in Flutter, it would be creating an app ecosystem that ran on iOS, Android, and, eventually, Fuchsia. Google has also shown that it is able and willing the make the Android Runtime work on non-Android platforms with Chrome OS, so if Google does choose to go through with a transition plan, perhaps it could port and entire Android stack over to Fuchsia as a stop-gap app solution."

Google’s “Fuchsia” smartphone OS dumps Linux, has a wild new UI | Ars Technica