Google prepares to release Fuchsia’s first developer preview
Fuchsia is an experimental operating system created by Google from scratch. Unlike Chrome OS and Android-based on Linux Kernel, Fuchsia is based on a new microkernel called Zircon. Previously, it was widely speculated that Fuchsia was used to replace Android or Chrome OS, but Google executives denied this claim. He said that Fuchsia is mainly used to try and test the latest technology, and integrate the results obtained in this process into other projects. According to the executive, Fuchsia is actually one of Google’s many experimental open-source projects.
In fact, so far, Google has not yet provided a build version of Fuchsia. If users want to try Fuchsia, they need to download the source code, build it, and install it on a few supported devices or run it through an emulator.
Last year, we reported that Fuchsia has entered the dogfood testing phase. According to Google’s usual development and release process, dogfood should be the last testing phase before the public test. If the final internal testing goes well, it is entirely possible for Google to bring Fuchsia to developers in advance.
Following Google’s usual development and release flow, dogfood should be the last stage of testing before reaching the public. If that final internal test goes well, it’s entirely possible that Google could move forward with bringing Fuchsia to developers sooner rather than later.
That said, I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a Google I/O 2020 reveal. The fishfood stage seemed to take a minimum of four months, at least between April and August 2019, and there was six months of teamfood testing between at least August 2019 and February 2020. Surely a much wider dogfood test would take just as long, if not longer, putting its end date into the latter half of the year.
At the end of January, the Fuchsia project created a new branch called “releases/F1”. In the past few months, the master branch has added dozens of code changes to the F1 branch. In addition, about six weeks after the creation of the F1 branch, a similar “releases/F2” branch was created. 9to5Google also found that the Google Flutter team is also making special preparations for the Fuchsia F1 release. The reason is that there is a branch specifically for Fuchsia F1 in the repo of the Flutter engine.
According to these actions of the Fuchsia team, 9to5Google, therefore, believes that Google is about to release the Fuchsia developer preview.