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By now, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Google has been hard at working building a successor to Android and Chrome OS. A few details leaked out last year, back when it was little more than a command line OS, but we had an official codename: Fuchsia.
The OS appears to be making some progress. First off, unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia isn’t based on Linux. Apparently Google’s created a new in-house “microkernel” they’re calling Magenta.
According to Google, Fuchsia will target “modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of RAM with arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation.” Exactly what they mean by that — and when we can expect to see this land on any sort of hardware — remains to be seen.
But we do know that Fuchsia now has a fully interactive system UI — dubbed Armadillo — that’s drastically unlike anything we’ve seen before. Providing us with our first look is HotFix.net’s Kyle Bradshaw who has compiled Armadillo into demo app for all to see. Here’s the video:
As you can see, Fuchsia is still extremely. The UI appears to be one big vertical scrolling page with placeholder “cards” (apps?) of information. There’s no back or recents button, just a home button that shows a user’s profile. The most interesting (and usable) part is the multitasking which you can activate by long pressing a card and combining it with another.
Despite having all the code out in the open, Google is still surprisingly mum on Fuchsia details although we imagine we’ll learn more at Google I/O coming up in just a few weeks time.
If you’d like to see Armadillo in action, you can sideload it onto your Android device by downloading the APK below.
Download: Armadillo APK
Judging by what you’ve seen so far — what do you think?
Fuchsia | via ArsTechnica
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