Fuchsia: Beginning of a new era?

Fuchsia at first glance comes off as a weird little word. While it sounds almost similar to the Chinese word Fengshui, Fuchsia is actually derived from modern Latin meaning a purplish-red flower. So why did Google name its upcoming OS after an exotics tubular flower and not a dessert?

Firstly, Fuchsia is a completely new project: it is not an extension of Android. Rather it is Google's cloak and dagger Real Time Operating System which will probably be platform agnostic. You can run it on Mobile, PC or even smart devices. There's very little info available publicly but one thing is for sure – Google is partnering with several tech giants to develop Fuchsia.

 Technologically, Fuchsia is also much different compared to Chromium and Android, Google's current two most popular OS. For starters, it is not based on Linux. Rather it is based on Zircon Kernel and can be written in an array of languages such as, C, C++, Dart, Go, LLVM, Python, Rust, Shell, Swift, JavascriptCore etc. Fuchsia is based on a new microkernel called "Zircon".

Zircon was derived from a small operating system called "Little Kernel", intended for embedded systems. But the big news broke when Fuchsia was updated with a user interface, along with a developer writing that the project was not a "dumping ground of a dead thing", prompting everyone to speculate about Google's intentions with the OS, including the possibility of it replacing the entire Android ecosystem.

 So what features will this OS be coming with? So far we have seen the UI which is a card-based UI named Armadillo. The app and UI, written on Flutter, can offer apps with high performance that run at 120 frames per second. In addition, Fuchsia's leaked info indicates that it might be a system that will run apps on the background to deliver you refined information, meaning that you won't need to install apps separately. The app store will find and deliver whatever you need from any specific app without even requiring any installation.

 All this information is from nearly a year back so fast forward to last week and Huawei and Google announced that they have been working on making the super secretive OS run on devices based on Huawei's homegrown Kirin 970 processor, starting with the Honor Play.

 Collaboration between Google and Huawei isn't new. Huawei's Nexus 6P was a market hit and Google was very happy with the company's performance. So it wasn't surprising when we heard the news of Huawei and Google's collaboration for Fuchsia. Huawei has a lot of Kirin 970 processor-based devices in the market – Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro, P20, P20 Pro, Honor 10, Nova 3, Honor Note 10 and many more upcoming devices just around the corner. According to analysts, the first proper usable glimpse of Fuchsia is expected to be available by mid-2019. So till then, we have to patiently wait for Google's next big announcement.