Google removes a lot of Fuchsia-related code from Android, and new progress of Starnix project is exposed

IT House July 16 news, this week, Google removed a lot of code about Fuchsia from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but Android and Fuchisia still have a close relationship.

Google’s internal operating system, Fuchsia, currently only supports the company’s two smart displays, the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max, but Google’s ambitions don’t stop there.

Google hopes to enable some Fuchsia devices to run apps for other operating systems such as Android and Linux. Of course, this is theoretically possible.

There are several ways to achieve this, one of Google’s earliest attempts was to run a full instance of the Android operating system in a virtual machine, which is why Chrome OS and Google Play Games for PC can support Android apps, but this approach also There are some potential performance flaws.

In addition, Google has also explored another path, which is to create a direct connection between Fuchsia and the Android Runtime. As found in 2019, Google has created a project in the AOSP code that will create a process for the Android Runtime designed for Fuchsia devices.

IT House has learned that the support of this Android project named “device /Google/Fuchsia” has stopped in February 2021, but it has not disclosed how things are going so far.

This week, Google removed all “device /Google/Fuchsia” code from Android, marking the end of this particular path.

After its removal, the project was left with a simple “TODO” message, indicating that Google was considering a new path. The developers responsible for this change are working on Fuchsia’s “Starnix” project.

It is worth mentioning that the project was exposed as early as 2021. The original intention of the Starnix project was to allow Fuchsia to “natively” run applications and libraries developed for Linux/Android. To achieve this, Starnix also converted the low-level kernel instructions from Linux to Fuchsia’s Zircon kernel.

It’s been over a year since Starnix’s proposal was accepted and work started. During this time, the Fuchsia team has made significant progress in developing Linux programs that can run on Fuchsia devices.

The Fuchsia project team is hoping to run Linux programs on Fuchsia devices. In fact, the official also provides a dedicated Starnix Shell, which can help developers and enthusiasts to play Fuchsia workstations.

It’s worth noting that this shell is not a simple Linux design, but a “small Android distribution included with the system”. More recently, this feature has also been replaced with access to Fuchsia and Starnix’s Android functionality via adb commands, arguably as easy as accessing any other Android device.

Going forward, Google seems to be preparing Fuchsia’s Starnix team to build a solution that is stable and compatible with Android and its applications, and Fuchsia’s roadmap also calls for it to better handle Android’s “init” process.

Back in June, there was another roadmap project stating that Google wanted to properly “up and running the clock app” in Fuchsia, which could be a reference to Google Clock or AOSP’s open source “desktop clock”. Of course, this particular project was hidden from the public shortly after it was announced, and only the screenshots below have been circulated.

All in all, Google’s Fuchsia team still seems to be thinking about building products other than smart homes, such as making Fuchsia an Android-like general-purpose operating system that is compatible with a large number of Android applications. But there’s no more word yet, and it remains to be seen what kind of devices Google intends to put these high-end designs on.