Android chief Dave Burke talks about Fuchsia at Google I/O, says it'll be an 'independent project'

The past couple of days have been extremely exciting for Google/Android developers, who were present at Google I/O 2017 to learn more about upcoming features and innovations. But just when we thought the conference was coming to a close, an Android fireside chat session sparked some interest and here we are — talking about Google’s latest open source project — Fuchsia.

Ever since the Fuchsia project appeared on GitHub, the rumor mill has been buzzing about speculations of this being a replacement for Android in the long run. But the said myth has been debunked by Dave Burke, Android’s vice president of engineering, who was the one to address the query about Fuchsia. And he cleverly steered clear of dropping any hint about what the said project is exactly about and said it is presently in ‘early stages’ of development.

Here’s the complete transcript of his answer to the question about Fuchsia (and find attached below the YouTube video for this very fireside session, the question makes an appearance around 10:31:00) —

How do you spell Fuchsia? Fuchsia is an early-stage experimental project. We, you know, we actually have lots of cool early projects at Google. I think what’s interesting here is it’s open source, so people can see it and comment on it. Like lots of early stage projects, it’s gonna probably pivot and morph.

There’s some really smart people on it, people we’ve worked with who are great. And so it’s kind of exciting to see what happens. But it’s definitely a different sort of independent project to android. And yeah, that’s basically it.

This simply means you’re not allowed to know much about this secretive open source project, except for the key fact that Google is developing it independent of Android. These two projects are probably running parallely, has no relations to Android and will most ‘pivot and morph’ over the course of time. Nothing more to know here, Burke puts the microphone!

As for what all we know about Fuchsia till date, this open source project is not being built upon Linux, unlike Google’s current operating systems. The underlying base for this project is said to an amalgamation of Magenta kernel and LK (Little Kernel). The latter is best suited for building lightweight components, while the former is being employed to build the groundwork. Developers have already started using Flutter SDK to compile the raw code found on GitHub to release APKs of a wildly new user experience.

We’ll now have to wait and watch out for more exciting updates on this new open-source project. What do you think Google Fuchsia will morph into, now that we know it’s independent of Android? Comment your thoughts down below.

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