Well, Google intends for this new OS to replace Android. They'll need to convince the public that this new OS is somehow better than Android, which everyone has come to know and love. It seems that they believe the best way to do that is a grassroots approach beginning with tech discussion hubs like HN and Reddit.
Of course, they could have just meme'd hard about the fact that they're moving away from evil Oracle technology and we'd have already all been on board.
Nothing, at all, has demonstrated that they plan it to replace Android -- that was a narrative various tech blogs invented. Nor would it have any benefit in moving away from the Java inspired/cloned underpinnings of the Android user layer.
Google has a variety of initiatives, and they really like reinventing things (which can sometimes yield great outcomes). This is a kernel that is in contrast with Linux.
From the article, the OS allows for full compatibility with all Android apps. Furthermore, it notes that Google is going out of its way to avoid mentioning Android anymore.
Of course, if I were Google and trying to sell the public on my new OS, I'd want them all to think that I'm not scrapping the old OS so that they feel they have a choice.
"the OS allows for full compatibility with all Android apps"
The article does not say that. The article mentions an ART target for Fuscia -- you have to build from something. That is approximately 0.1% of the way towards full compatibility. And for that matter you can run Android apps on a load of targets (although far from full compatibility), but that doesn't mean that they're replacing Android.
Google may absolutely replace Android -- they've made loads and loads of mistakes along the way -- but the way people keep arguing it doesn't make sense, using examples that jettison the parts that work well and somehow keep the parts that don't work well (which includes ART, as an aside). And indeed I'm falling into this same trap while talking about Fuscia like it's a kernel, when really the kernel is a small part and they're, at a very small scale, spit-boarding a new take on virtually every part of the system.
Regarding Google distancing itself from the Android name, that's just branding. To quote one analysis -- "Android sounds technical, has baggage, and might be stale". They've had enough missteps that it's an anchor more than a lift, so it makes sense that they stop highlighting it.
> Android, which everyone has come to know and love.
Haha, honestly now. If my Android didn't cost $700 I would long since have smashed it to bits. It's scheduler is totally garbage, to the point where Google's own media apps like YouTube and Music drop samples while the screen is redrawing. Who "loves" Android? To me it is the Win98 of mobile operating systems.
When you only have two real choices, each with their own significant set of distinct problems, I think the term "love" can be substituted for "hate the least". Android, which everyone has come to know and hate the least. Well, not everyone, but my point is the same regardless.
I left Symbian for Android 2.1, after several Android devices, became part of the 10% of WP share in Europe, now still using one of them as secondary device.
That's a turn of phrase to indicate that not everyone loves, but it _is_ well known and probably the biggest consumer OS on the planet in terms of volume.
Also though, I do love it. Different strokes and all
In that case it wouldn't have replaced Android at all -- It would have simply replaced the Android kernel, which happens to be Linux. And at that point you have to ask what is gained, and at this point the answer is "nothing".
How, exactly, will they "not have to care"? The identical ramifications occur with Fuscia as they happen with Linux! This is farce.
Every single problem that Android has had, from low-latency audio issues (they've rebuilt that a dozen times in a dozen cartoonish ways) to driver stagnancy, is completely and directly a result of Google choices and implementations (and they do the same thing again and again! It's remarkable). The notion that Google is going to fix all of their own self-sabotage by starting anew is comedic in a sense, and is the folly of countless foolish projects. "We keep fucking up again and again...let's start from scratch and this time we'll surely do it right!"
Google has never been required to commit upstream, but they've chosen to do so because of the ease of integrating changes downstream. They could have forked off and bashed the code into whatever form they wanted to. Breaking anything and everything.
But they didn't. They kept keeping it in sync. They probably had a reason for doing that.
Android OEMs are not in the business of writing kernels, though, and the changes they do are minimal. And their HAL/chipset code -- the thing they might actually care about as IP -- is not governed by the GPL at all, nor is any of the enormous volume of system and userspace code they write.
It's a neat initiative and might yield something interesting, but if the Linux kernel was replaced by Fuscia the ramifications are seemingly very minor. Android's many issues have never been at the kernel level.
Qualcomm has no obligation to GPL their kernel drivers. Nor does nvidia, or any other KLM maker. This has never demanded that kernel drivers be open sourced. That's why it's impossible to make a runnable AOSP image for many devices.
Vendors still make generally minor changes to the kernel, but these are not unique or special or some competitive edge. They've just nuisance necessities.
It's way more grey than that. Nvidia claims that their driver doesn't need to be opened because since it's A) from a codebase that existed prior to the Linux port, and B) doesn't actually import any Linux code or symbols (that's left to a dual licensed shim layer), that in a legal sense their driver isn't 'derived from' the Linux kernel and isn't subject to the viral parts of the GPL. And, all of this is the greyest of grey area. Towards that end, Nvidia has been committing to Nouveau lately for Tegra chips because I think they realize how precarious their legal situation is for chips essientially designed to run Linux.
That reasoning doesn't apply to most kernel drivers, and those vendors are just openly in conflict with the GPL.
Literally any driver that has a piece that runs in interrupt context has to have (in part) a kernel mode driver under Linux.
On top of that, GPUs generally have to have a kernel component, even under systems that put as much as possible under user mode like sel4, because they have their own MMUs that can subvert kernel integrity.
Again, yes there are drivers running in the kernel space, yes they are mostly GPL, no Google isn't re-writing them into Binderized HALs, they can stay as Passthrough HALs.
Nothing of that prevents that all new drivers, except for the ones marked as legacy, are required to be Binderized.
The kernel code of a driver from OEMs allergic to GPL, is hardly different from a signal handler, implementing the minimal set of kernel code and deferring everything else to userspace.
Ah appealing to authority as last argument, naturally any kind of opinion and knowledge of what I might have as Android developer, or former professional experience in systems programming is worthless.
More that I recognized a position that comes from a cursory understanding of the situation. About the level I'd expect from having taken a few classes on it, but lacks true experience in the domain. One of those "in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not" sort of situations. You've taken those ideas to conclusions that could have been valid, but the industry took other options.
Now, as someone who has spent a decade in that domain, I'm down to continue having a conversation about it and helping overcome a few of those hurdles, but you need to be willing to hear something that isn't your own conclusions.
Linux has countless LKMs (modules that run in the kernel, but are not -- broadly -- bound by the GPL). Many, many are closed-source and proprietary. Others aren't because they don't have to be.
You hinted that this transgresses the GPL, and there are those that argue that virtually anything transgresses the GPL. But a lot of very large corporations say otherwise, and there have been zero successful challenges against it.
It is sort of replacing Android, but not really. But it sort of is.
The kernel is designed to have a stable binary interface for drivers. This has been a problem with Linux-based Android devices (all of them so far), because the OEMs (or more properly the chipset vendors like Qualcomm) will only support a particular chipset for a short amount of time (maybe a couple years, it depends).
After that, it becomes hard to bring new kernels to the platform, so we all end up with phones stuck at whatever major release was out at the time, with low prospects of upgrades.
If you can make a stable binary API, and furthermore keep to the micro-kernel model, then most of the OS can be easily upgraded, because you don't need (and aren't going to get) new versions of the device drivers for the chipset.
Also, there's an effort towards better low-latency real-time support. This is critical for AR/VR applications with tight rendering deadlines.
Currently it's just rumors that it will replace Android based on Fushia and Flutter's target devices. You can see a summary on [the wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia).
I don’t care about the android aspects. I’m just fascinated by OS development. Fuschia is a new capabilities-secure microckernel OS backed by Big Google, so it’s got a lot of potential and engineering support behind it. I read and upvote pretty much anything about Fuschia.
Depending on how internal politics play out at Google, Android's kernel might eventually be replaced by Fuchsia (ART is already being ported, commits are visible on AOSP).
