Google’s Android follow-up, Fuchsia OS, might be coming to developers soon

Fuchsia is an operating system just like Android, macOS or Windows, that is developed by Google as an open source project.

Android. (Pixabay)

Back in 2017, Google said that it is working on a follow-up of its Android operating system, called Fuchsia. Although it has not revealed a lot about this new platform over the years, according to a report by 9to5Google, the search giant seems ready to give developers access to the new open source operating system. This might happen through the release of a beta version of the software soon.

In case you aren't aware, Fuchsia is an operating system just like Android, macOS or Windows, that is developed by Google as an open source project. Although Fuchsia is said to be not running on Linux, Google recently unveiled a proposal for how the platform can still run apps that are written for Linux platforms. This also includes Android apps. The operating system is also set to have the potential to run on almost any device including smartphones, laptops or any other Internet of Things devices.

For now, Fuchsia has only been available for those who have downloaded the source code, have built it themselves and installed it on one of the few supported devices or run through the emulator. It is also worth mentioning that none of the releases have come out for developers yet.

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If you have some knowledge on how the developer side of things works, it has been reported that in the end of January, a new branch of code was created in the Fuchsia project, entitled “releases/F1”. Also reported by 9to5Google is that over the past few months several code changes have been added to this particular branch of code from the main master branch. So that brings us to the question that what exactly is F1?

It has been speculated that since Fuchsia is now well past the dogfood stage of testing, the F1 might finally be the first milestone release of Fuchsia.

Roughly six weeks after the F1 branch appeared, there was a similar “releases/F2” branch in the Fuchsia source. The Fuchsia bug tracker even has issues tagged to be fixed in a later “F3” release.

Although nothing can be confirmed for now, from what we can see, Google's Fuchsia OS might just be approaching the first proper release for developers.

For now, it is anyone's guess how the final OS version will look like and what will rightfully make it the follow up of Android, which in itself is a pretty powerful and feature-rich OS.