Android has become an inseparable part of the lives of the people who are altogether using over 2 billion Android devices around the world among which are three quarters of the world's smartphones. It has spread like wildfire since its first use in a commercial device back in September 2008. However since Android came into existence with the rise of touchscreen phones, it wasn't really designed for voice interactions powered by Machine Learning and AI capabilities that Google envisions for the future.





A team of Google engineers have thus been secretly working on an open source Operating System called Fuchsia with voice interaction capabilities at its core, that they hope will replace Android as the world's dominant mobile Operating System.The current strength of this secretive team stands at 100 including talented people like Matias Duarte, Vice President of Material Design at Google.









Fuchsia uses a kernel called Zircon and this move away from Linux allows the developers to build from scratch a more optimized OS with better security and is easier to upgrade. The ability to start from scratch has allowed the developers to incorporate many changes which they felt necessary learning from their mistakes with Android. One such example being Google being dependent on device manufacturers to roll out the latest software updates which the manufactures don't have much incentive to do.





Fuchsia aims at being the single Operating System which is capable of running all of Google's Products like Pixel phones and smart speakers as well as third party devices which currently run on Android OS or Chrome OS.





Image Source : cnet





The first target of Fuchsia is to be embedded in all smart speakers like the Google Home speakers in the next three years and then move on to larger devices like Laptops. In the next five years they aim to replace Android in all smartphones.Fuchsia is being developed with adaptation to multiple screen sizes in mind making it suitable for use across all device types.





Android currently supports a huge number of hardware devices, developers and advertisement agencies and so it is going to be anything but easy to replace it. Also, there is no publicly announced roadmap from Google with regards to Fuchsia. Added to this are some reportedly fierce internal debates with respect to tighter privacy principles inherent in fuchsia which could affect Google's ad revenue as they depend heavily on user data to deploy targeted ads.





Fuchsia OS Preview | Image Source : cdn0.tnwcdn.com





Even though it seems that a lot is stacked up against Fuchsia OS, history clearly say that nothing can stop a technology when its time has come. The push by Google in its last keynote to voice interactions, the increasing entry into smart home devices by many major companies coupled with the problems of Android with respect to performance, security and rolling out of updates clearly indicates that the time for Fuchsia has come.













How soon do you think Fuchsia OS will become prevalent?

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