Google has removed its open source Zircon-based operating system Fuchsia’s code from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), per 9to5Google.
Google appears to have been working on Fuchsia since 2016, and in 2019 it was described as one of the company’s experiments with new operating system concepts. The first-generation Nest Hub becomes the first device running Fuchsia in May 2021.
Google seems to want devices running Fuchsia that can run apps from other platforms like Android and Linux. Theoretically, this should allow Fuchsia to replace other operating systems in the not too distant future.
We’ve heard rumors that Google may have been thinking of porting Android and Chrome devices including Pixel phones to Fuchsia, and even Samsung is contributing to its development. Some reports have also indicated that future Samsung phones could run Fuchsia.
Initially, Google tried running Android using a virtual machine on Fuchsia devices, but that wasn’t necessarily the most efficient way.
To create a more direct relationship, the company created a project called device/google/fuchsia in Android Public Code (AOSP) in 2019 that will generate builds of the Android Runtime designed for mobile devices. run Fuchsia. The project stopped in early 2021 and this week, all the code for it has been removed from Android.
That code has been replaced with a “TO-DO” message, indicating that Google may be working on a replacement. The developer made this change based on the Starnix project, which was designed to allow Fuchsia to run apps and libraries that were originally built for Android or Linux. This is similar to how Apple’s M-series-enabled Macs run Intel-based applications using the Rosetta 2 dynamic binary compiler.
Here’s how Google describes it:
As we expand the universe of software that we want to run on Fuchsia, we encounter software that we want to run on Fuchsia that we don’t have the ability to recompile. For example, Android applications contain native code modules that have been compiled for Linux. To run this software on Fuchsia, we need to be able to run binaries without modifying them.
The Starnix team is currently working on making Fuchsia compatible with Android and its apps. All of this seems to indicate that Google is actively working to bring Fuchsia to more devices.
