At a fireside chat on the last day of I/O 2019, Hiroshi Lockheimer talked about Fuchsia publicly in a high-level manner for the first time. It comes as Google quietly acknowledged the operating earlier this week at the developer conference. The Google SVP of Android, Chrome/OS, and Play described it as one of Google’s experiments around new concepts for operating systems.

Lockheimer said that Google has many projects underway internally, and Fuchsia is an “investment by us in sort of modernizing and trying new concepts around operating systems.”

Google has many projects under way. We’re a technology company, so we invest in various technologies and experiments and so on. And some of those experiments and investments, we do in the public as open source projects. Fuchsia is one of them.

The chief of Google’s two major operating systems today was quick to downplay the narrative that Fuchsia is replacing Android or Chrome OS. He repeatedly emphasized that the effort is about “learning new technologies.”

So, naturally, a lot of people — sort of, you know — assume, “It’s a new OS from Google, so it must be the future. The one OS from Google,” you know. That’s not how we look at it. We look at it as sort of a place where we can try out new ideas.

Lockheimer instead pointed to Internet of Things, and how “there are all kinds of devices that require operating systems.”

It’s not just phones and PCs. In the world of IoT, there are increasing number of devices that require operating systems and new runtimes and so on. I think there’s a lot of room for multiple operating systems with different strengths and specializations. Fuchsia is one of those things and so, stay tuned.

More about Fuchsia:

Kyle Bradshaw contributed to this report

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