Google’s “Fuchsia” smartphone OS dumps Linux, has a wild new UI

  • Right now, if you want to order concert tickets or pay your parking meter, you need specific dedicated apps. The result of this is rows and rows of single-purpose apps "silos" on you phone, having to create an account and entering your credit card for each of them. I think some folks at Google got bored of that and wondered "what's next?".

    Ultimately, what we want is not the app itself (the silo), but what the app enables (what's inside). I don't want to download a parking meter app, I just want to pay for parking. I don't want to download LiveNation's app. I just want to order concert tickets. The system should be able to generate an interface that allows me to do x,y,z depending on context, without having to manage credit cards, adresse and accounts.

    Chatbots are here, personal assistant, too. You can use your messaging app to order stuff, find answers or send money to your friends. The writing is on the wall: single-purpose apps are not the future and chatbots and AI assistant potentially means less Google search and ad click.

    So Google figured that re-purposing Android to fit this new paradigm would be an impossible task so they just said fuck it! Let's start from scratch with a solid base. Let's design a platform that will be everywhere, runs on everything, update silently like Chrome, and is made with AI in mind.

  • At first I had a lot of trouble making sense of the UI, but now I think it's pretty neat. It's essentially the final form of the Material Design idea, where each app is a Card like a physical deck of playing cards, and you get to arrange them by dragging them around, with the important and intentional limitation that they snap into one of a finite number of arrangements. How do you undo a splitscreen or tabbed layout, though?

    The rest is just mockups at this point, I hope; for example, the control center is pretty rough: presumably the user knows their own location, and when they're looking at this screen, they probably don't care; the full date is hidden whereas most people forget today's date much more often than they forget their own location; there is no obvious way to do auto-brightness, the negative space is in all the wrong places; etc.

  • The best part of Fuchsias UI is their Armadillo logo.

  • What does google gain from ditching linux?

  • If anyone else is wondering like I did how to pronounce it, visit this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrbZSYlR_bM . It's apparently the name of a shrub and also a color: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fuchsia

    I unfortunately kept pronouncing it "fucks-yeah" in my mind and was wondering why on earth would google name it as such, until I discovered that it's actually "fyushya".

  • Note: You can play with the UI on your android phone: http://www.mediafire.com/file/wpjxvjwd236cfz1/Armadillo.apk

    Since flutter is a cross platform UI framework.

  • I played with Flutter before, and it is such a nice way to build mobile apps. Its based on react, its like react native but it has its own rendering engine.

    And i can also image apps to be loaded directly from the web (ala like a browser).

  • Hopefully, they can somehow improve standby battery power longevity.

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  • edit: nevermind