Right now Google is actively involved with 2 operating systems: Chrome OS, which works on Chromebook laptops & its Android smartphone OS, which also forms the basis for Android Wear, Android TV & even the IoT variant, Android Things. But soon a 3rd OS will be coming on board, called Fuchsia, which aims to be the new standard smartphone OS from Google.
The new OS has been under development at Google for over a year. Reports related to it have been recently leaked. This information paints Fuchsia as a completely new OS, written from scratch & undergoing a heavy development effort involving a crack team of in-house Google developers.
A peek at Fuchsia & its Armadillo System UI shows that Google leaves Android’s traditional windowing UI design behind, substituting it with a vertical scrolling design, based on “Story” cards that represent recent apps. There’s a list of suggestions that are reminiscent of Google Now & a lot more innovative UI bits that hint at things to come, although the current version of the OS is in a pre-Alpha state.
With this effort, it looks like Google is looking forward to leaving its veritable Linux & Java-based Android OS behind & also parting ways with the Open Source GPL. The new OS is also open source, but based on BSD, MIT & Apache licenses, & will not Google beholden to Oracle’s Java VM.
The Linux kernel will be replaced by a Magenta microkernel, designed for embedded real-time operating systems, & is written using Google’s JavaScript alternative Dart programming language & the “Flutter” SDK, which gives it cross-platform capabilities, so that it can also run on Android & iOS.
This means that the new OS is focused on high performance, since the combination of Dart, Flutter & its new “Escher” high speed renderer is optimized to speed up Google’s Material Design UI guidelines.
The Fuchsia design team is led by Travis Geiselbrecht & a high-powered team of Google developers. You can follow the goings on via the GitHub project page here.
Image Credit: GitHub
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