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Comment by raggi | Hacker News Reader

Fuchsia shipped on Google Home Hubs, upgrading them in the field (replacing everything from firmware up). We did so without breaking them all.

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Why? Did Fuschia enable any new features on Google Home Hubs which would have been more difficult/impossible with a Linux kernel? It's an honest question, my bias is that Fuschia is a solution in search of a problem but I am happy to be convinced otherwise.

Fuchsia has a significantly better security stance, in both implementation and in architecture.

What was the security issue with whatever the original OS was? It's not like I'm installing any apps on these things.

Hubs are fully vendor locked in, and Google controls every single but running there. Security argument, while valid like everywhere, seems BS. I’d be surprised if security profile for a hub was main concern for the product.

Anecdotally my hub got much less responsive around the Fuchsia update. I’m not blaming Fuchsia directly for it, but one could wonder what would happen, if resources dedicated to that, were spent on usability improvements.

Let’s be honest, Fuchsia was rolled to a Hub, because it’s a product no one really cares about and team needed some guinea pig/stuff in production to justify its existence. I say that confidently, as someone working at big tech, and having myself experience being in rollouts like that.

The Nest team definitely won't agree with your value judgement of these devices, nor do many of the users who paid for them. To this end, even if there are different motivations for different teams and other tactical considerations, it is absolutely necessary for the owning team of a product to have a real motivation for such a significant operation as replacing the entire firmware and runtime in the field. That set of motivations are rooted in the properties of the OS: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts

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