Fuchsia OS officially exists, but not as you may think

It has been nearly 3 years now since people first discovered evidence of a whole new operating system called Fuchsia on GitHub. This apparent new suite of software, attributed to Google, quickly attained an almost mythic status, particularly as this developer would never directly admit that it even existed.

Fuchsia OS has become the center of a great deal of speculation over the last few years. Some believed that it was being developed to replace Android at some point, whereas others hypothesized that it was similarly present to supplant Chrome OS. Its code may also invite other lines of speculation, such as that it is more of an ubiquitous OS, one that can be installed and control any kind of Google product, even those belonging to emerging categories such as the internet of things (IoT).

The Vergecast is a regular podcast, an episode of which was conducted in conjunction with Google I/O 2019. Accordingly, it had Stephanie Cuthbertson, Google's director of Android, and Hiroshi Lockheimer, the company's head of Android and Chrome, on as guests. This led to the concept of Fuchsia OS being discussed in more detail - the first time Google executives have done so.

Lockheimer admitted that Fuchsia exists, but then proceeded to disrupt much of the speculation around it. He asserted that the OS has merely been developed to "push the state of the art in terms of operating systems". The lessons apparently learned as a result of this process are to be applied to the creation of further new systems for various different platforms in the future. Lockheimer's opinion on this subject, which is that "there’s a lot of room for multiple operating systems with different strengths and specializations", appears to indicate that next-gen Google hardware will not be compatible with any kind of unifying software after all.

Therefore, it appears that Fuchsia's successors - which may be great in number - are the future, and not this mysterious OS itself.