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Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

Google's well on their way to replacing Android, no? I thought a lot of their announcements at events the last couple years had been about their from-scratch Android replacement.

Maybe another big company will pick it up, but if not, I don't see much benefit to the hobbyist community over the current status quo if Android gets "opened up" more but also loses 99+% of total corporate backing toward its development. Even if Amazon or MS run with it (and maybe that's what this is the beginning of?) that seems more like an on-life-support scenario than one with a bright future for Android.

Could go totally differently if major phone and tablet manufacturers ignore the New Shiny Thing and stick with Android so developing commercial software for it remains viable, I guess.

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I don't think Google is in a position to "replace" Android. They simply don't control the hardware; they can ship Fuchsia to their Home assistants and thermostats, but when it comes to phones and personal computing devices, they don't have many cards to play (beyond Pixel, like 0.5% of the Android market). The power lies with hardware manufacturers and developers.

Their new wearables partnership with Samsung may help here. Maybe Samsung would play along with a new Fuchsia phone OS. But there's still the developer issue; any new OS like this would need Android-backward compatibility support exactly similar to what Microsoft is doing here. "Android" in this sense doesn't mean "the OS"; its the application system.

What's happening in the Android world right now is so healthy and excellent, I almost can't believe its the product of Big Tech. Google is already pushing Android apps on ChromeOS, now Microsoft has them on Windows, through the Amazon app store, and nowhere in any of this is the actual Android Operating System. The comparison here isn't Android vs iOS vs Windows; its Android vs Flutter vs Web. Its a new way of writing "native"-adjacent multiplatform applications; the OS doesn't matter anymore.

Sure the touch-friendly UI will suck in some applications, on some deployments of Windows. That's not Android's fault; its on the developer to recognize the input method and canvas size, and adjust accordingly. I hope more do!

I hope they try, and I suspect it would end up the same way that OS/2 ended up for IBM, i.e. failure. Not that I love or hate any particular company; but I do believe in (real) competition and I think this would help foster that. (Strong enemy of my enemy vibes here though.)

Right, but if no-one picks up the torch of maintaining and developing Android and giving it away to device manufacturers, I'd imagine going with the new Google OS that they are going to do that for, would be very tempting. Most phone manufacturers haven't shown an interest in putting a ton of work into the Android, themselves, even just to customize it beyond adding some shovel-ware and maybe a theme (notable exception: Samsung)

Possibly the app ecosystem will survive, even if the OS itself withers into obscurity, provided Fuscia can run Android apps (seems likely, but I haven't kept up with news on that sort of thing)

If Google were to ditch Android for Fuchsia, I could see this Microsoft/Amazon alliance stepping in and saying they'll build Android moving forward.

I think that's exactly what this is; it functions as insurance of sorts for the mobile world - such that they aren't totally locked out of a feasible platform (see tablets especially for both ) and also a "why not" for MS & Amazon both. It gives MS a starting point for an Android SDK + existing Amazon Android apps - and Amazon can bolster their offerings which currently are fairly barebones.

It could amount to little, of course. Even iOS apps on MacOS as a concept and practice has not remotely the luster ardent Apple acolytes predicted, certainly not yet even 7 months in.

When/if Google ditches Android you think they will give up the echo system? You think suddenly Android apps wouldn't run on Fuchsia? It would be a seamless transition(look at how they did it on the Nest Hub).

All the "cool" new Google features and performance upgrades may be Fuchsia only. I wouldn't bank much on Amazon. They just need an OS to run their readily disposable devices. I don't see them putting too much effort into this.

Google is going the hold the hand of manufacturers and ease them into it.

At least if Google had any sense this is how it would be done.

Fuchsia is a kernel, not operating system. Google intends to swap Linux under Android to Fuchsia. One reason is the bad track record of Linux supporting device drivers.

I thought Zircon is the kernel and Fuchsia is the operating system. Though that wouldn't prevent Google from building Android on top of Fuchsia.

> Its a new way of writing "native"-adjacent multiplatform applications; the OS doesn't matter anymore.

If only someone had thought about that before: a language targeting a bytecode interpreter and an ecosystem of library sitting on top of the operating system in order to be able to run programs on any operating system. In a way we could call it a virtual machine as it makes the OS insignificant. Written like this it sounds like 1994 tech. A shame we had to wait so long...

Byte Code and VMs are are older than just 90's tech but okay. I still honestly prefer native code, but it does not work well for non-open source software unless the developer also compiles for other systems. Also windows is really the only major non-*nix OS these days. Although apples GUI software stack is still a pain port for when porting.

Sure, its 20s tech (WASM), 10s tech (Web/PWA), 00s tech (Java), 90s tech (Java), 80s tech (Erlang/BEAM), jeeze even 50s tech (Lisp)...

There are people who complain about how the industry is moving in cycles and how what's old is new again and how functional languages did that back in 1922. These people don't change the world; they just complain about how other people are changing it.

Huh? I don't see how what I was saying was complaining? Sure things sometimes happen in cycles, I did not even mention that, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. VMs, and byte codes are a tool, and have their place. However, they do have their limitations compared to natively compiled code.

Like?

Just because it is bytecode it doesn't mean it is interpreted.

> Unlike some other virtual-machine architectures in which the virtual instructions are interpreted at run time, TIMI instructions are never interpreted. They constitute an intermediate compile time step and are translated into the processor's instruction set as the final compilation step. The TIMI instructions are stored within the final program object, in addition to the executable machine instructions. This is how application objects compiled on one processor family (e.g., the original CISC AS/400 48-bit processors) could be moved to a new processor (e.g., PowerPC 64-bit) without re-compilation. An application saved from the older 48-bit platform can simply be restored onto the new 64-bit platform where the operating system discards the old machine instructions and re-translates the TIMI instructions into 64-bit instructions for the new processor.

From https://handwiki.org/wiki/IBM_System_i

Also LISP in 1958. It's a great idea that will always be around.

It's a great idea, but it will only work if it comes with a UI library that doesn't suck and a software distribution mechanism that doesn't suck. No-one wants to install "an app to run an app", so you need to distribute these applications as either native executables or something equally convenient, and it needs to be completely trivial for application developers to do that or they won't bother. That's the reason Electron is winning at the moment.

I thought Samsung had their own OS[0] that they were using for watches/smart TVs, and also keeping in their back pocket as a hedge against Google's influence? Are they giving that up?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen

Tizen is used for Smart TVs, refrigerators, and cameras. Targeting devices that need to be "smart" but have a relatively low CPU budget and at best embedded GPUs.

The most recent phone that shipped with Tizen had a 480 x 800 pixel display.

Java was there first, and SavaJe OS could have been Android, but then Sun was screwed by Google.

And then there was this Pascal VM available across all 16 bit home computers, starting at the UCSD.

They might use Fuschia to replace the Linux kernel in Android, but Android would remain the same from an end user or app developer perspective.

They aren't just going to turf Android.

Google replacing Android might end up like when Intel tried to replace x86. AMD came along with AMD64 and forced Intel back into making compatible chips. It might end up being an even brighter future for Android.

Google has about as much power to replace Android as Microsoft has the power to replace Windows. The ecosystem is too big now to go back.

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