Google Fuchsia: What is it and when will it release?

Emma Sims July 23, 2018

Project Fuschia – a new operating system from Google – has been a work in progress for two years, and looks set to replace the Android operating system currently used by three-quarters of the world, a recent report by Bloomberg reveals.

Google Fuchsia: What is it and when will it release?

The search engine giant behind Android – currently the world’s most dominant operating system – has put 100 engineers on the job of developing new OS Fuchsia. Its raison d’être? Fuchsia wants to overcome Android’s limitations as personal devices increasingly come online.

What’s more, reports from The Verge suggest that Fuchsia will be “more secure” and easier to update than Android, which officially launched back in September 2008. However, a Google spokesperson told the publication that “Fuchsia is one of many experimental open source projects at Google. We’re not providing additional details about that project at this time.” Looks like Google is keeping things as enigmatic as ever, for now at least…

We’ve collated everything you need to know about the upcoming OS from Google, Project Fuchsia.

Google Fuchsia features: What is it?

Project Fuchsia is a work-in-progress OS from search engine giant Google. It’s been in development for the past couple of years, with Google assigning a sizeable team of 100 engineers to the endeavour.

Fuchsia is billed to eventually replace Android as the foremost OS in the world, although for now the team is said to be ironing out the internal kinks in the software. Given the magnitude of the project, there’s understandably some debate about how the software can and should work.

Indeed, Fuchsia is being touted as a unifying OS capable of running all the company’s in-house gadgets, such as Google Home, Chromebooks, smartwatches and the Pixel smartphones.

Google Fuchsia: Why now?

Given the tidal wave of personal devices and other gadgets going online, Android is showing some limitations which need overcoming. Hence the team at Google engineering a whole new OS in order to combat them.

In particular, Fuchsia is being designed to work better with voice interactions, as well as offering more robust – and more frequent – security updates. Another anomaly the OS is overcoming is aesthetics; Fuchsia is expected to look the same across a range of devices, from laptops to smartphones and everything in between.

google_fuchsia_operating_system

There’s another, less conventional reason behind Project Fuchsia too; it’s a “senior-engineer retention project”. Apparently, the company is offering its long-term personnel a new and exciting challenge lest they jump ship to industry rivals should the work get too monotonous. Two birds, one stone and all that.

Google Fuchsia release date: When will we see it?

In short, within the next five years.

From what we can tell via the code Google quietly started publishing online, Fuchsia initially went into development back in 2016. Since then, Google has let third-party app developers play around with it, as well as toying itself with applications for the system such as interactive screen displays and voice commands for YouTube.

As the Bloomberg report suggests, we’ll be seeing Fuchsia embedded on smart home devices within three years, with the OS expanding outward to larger machines like laptops soon afterwards.

If this sounds like a lengthy wait, we can’t imagine it’s an easy feat to manufacture a replacement OS for the one used by three-quarters of the world. What’s more, the report suggests that Sundar Pichai and Hiroshi Lockheimer (the man behind Android and Chrome) have not set concrete plans into motion yet: “The executives have to move gingerly on any plan to overhaul Android because the software supports dozens of hardware partners, thousands of developers – and billions of mobile-ad dollars”.

Nonetheless, with 100 engineers working on the project, including legendary design executive Matias Duarte, we’re looking forward to something spectacular, however incrementally it does emerge.

We’ll be updating this page regularly with news regarding Google’s Project Fuchsia, so be sure to check back in for everything you need to know about the OS replacing Android.