Ron Amadeo
Google is still reeling from last Friday’s biggest layoffs in the company’s history. Initial cost reductions over the past six months have led to several projects being closed or deprioritized at Google. It’s hard for him to lay off 12,000 people without hitting additional projects. The New York Times ran a report on which divisions were hit hardest, the big one being Fuchsia, Google’s future OS development group.
While the company as a whole has cut 6% of its workforce, The Times noted that Fuchsia hit 16% of its 400 employees. It’s not clear what that means for the future of the division, but the future of Fuchsia’s division is by no means clear.
Fuchsia has been a constant mystery within Google since it was first widely reported in 2017. Google rarely talks about it officially, leaving most of the rumors and his Github documentation to figure out what’s going on. But the OS is no small project. Not based on Linux, opting instead to use a custom in-house kernel, Google actually builds the entire OS from scratch. Google is actually shipping the OS to consumers on Nest smart displays, replacing the older Cast OS. Operating system in-place swap was completely invisible to consumers, had no benefits compared to older OSes, and was never officially announced or promoted. Fuchsia remains a mystery even after it ships, as there’s not much you can do with a locked-down smart display.
The biggest question surrounding Fuchsia is “why does it exist and what is its purpose?” Will Fuchsia eventually replace Android or Chrome OS? When Fuchsia first ran on a Pixelbook, circa 2018, the custom kernel source code documentation read, “It’s a combination of modern phones with fast processors and the latest It’s targeted at personal computers,” and sounded like a successor to Android and Chrome OS. Built for flagship devices. Its early codebase also included graphical user interfaces for PCs and phones, further recognizing this as a consumer OS. Removed the public interface code after Fuchsia was first advertised.
In 2018, it called Fuchsia “Android’s successor,” with the team planning to launch a smart speaker in 2021 (which was spot on), then moving to phones and laptops in 2023. We also saw a basic Bloomberg report that it plans to do so. Even the name “Fuchsia” was a reference to an Apple project in which some members of the team were involved. “Pink” was the codename for the canceled successor to the old Mac OS, and “Purple” was the codename for his iPhone OS. Fuchsia is a mixture of pink and purple, so this sounds very ambitious.
