Google might ditch Android and ChromeOS for a standalone Fuchsia OS in the future
Google is reportedly developing a new standalone OS for all the cross-platform devices named Fuchsia. This OS is still in the early stages and a working prototype has surfaced online. This experimental OS has been tested on a Google Pixelbook. Though the company doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the OS yet, it might ditch the most popular Android and Chrome OS in the future in its favour.
Image: ArsTechnica
This experimental OS was witnessed last year in May but it was only a glimpse of system UI running on top of Android and it functioned like a normal app, with a few multitasking elements. Google named Fuchsia’s SDK name as ‘Flutter’ which was shut down by the company later.
Image: ArsTechnica
The Fuchsia team picked the Chrome OS-powered Google Pixelbook as a supported device to run this prototype, which revealed all the possibilities of a future standalone OS of Google.
Image: ArsTechnica
According to ArsTechnica team which tested this prototype version, Fuchsia OS was up and running on a Pixelbook which was connected to a network adapter, USB drive and the Linux virtual machine which streamed the system files to the Pixelbook.
Image: ArsTechnica
Unfortunately, this isn’t a fully functional OS at least for now but assures more to come in the future. As far as the functioning can be seen, the OS has three modes which include a smartphone, a tablet, and a fully functional desktop mode. The UI even has a quick settings and split tabs mode for multitasking, however, those aren’t completely working. The OS welcomes with a home screen and has a few set of profiles and also has a network connection, but the web pages don’t load full and are stuck on a blank page. The navigation in the system UI and the OS seem to be pretty smooth. Other Google apps such as Phone, Calendar, Browser, Docs are appeared as photos, for now, to get an idea of it looks when the OS is fully functional.
Image: ArsTechnica
The team says, “Fuchsia probably has a long way to go. Android took five years at Google to become a consumer operating system, while Fuchsia has only been in development for about two years.” This might be the new future OS of Google which might be a different approach to the consumers who are accustomed to Android and Chrome OS.
