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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

If anyone was going to reinvent an OS I’d like google to do it. They’re capable and have the cash to do it. I do think have this in conjunction with buying HTC (rumored) could be them trying to iPhone and their lineup by owning both the software (via fuschia) and the hardware.

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Google can't get Gmail to sort mail properly. Amongst a thousand of small grievances I have.

That may seem quite irrelevant, but if I'd like someone to reinvent the OS, I'd like it to be people that have taken a stance in favour of stable, simple, straightforward software (the people behind Pinboard, Tarsnap; djb... just to name a few).

I've never had any issues sorting mail in gmail. I'm curious what specific action causes mis-sorting.

Basically, in some views the sorting is by the first message in the thread, while in other views it is by the last message (that last one makes more sense to me).

Even more surprisingly, Inbox (by Google) sorts everything by last message (last time I checked, which was a long time ago).

You can't sort by "From" at all.

It seems like the software you mentioned does well because they are so small. I'm not sure a team similarly small could produce a modern OS that addresses the needs of generic phones (in the sense of they are truly incredibly complex oses, not in the sense of running on arbitrary phones).

Notably, small teams can dictate priorities that don't scale at the level of tens of thousands of engineers.

Tarsnap and djb would be great if you wanted an OS no-one outside a handful of nerds would end up using. There are no shortages of those.

It depends of how you define OS. But OS as in how it is meant for Fuschia is really something the user doesn't get to interact with.

Also would be nice to have a company focused on privacy developing operating systems. Google is the opposite.

That’s why I use an iPhone. Have you seen how mad advertisers are at Apple, makes me laugh.

You could argue they've already reinvented an OS with ChromiumOS. Despite its shortcomings and limitations, I think they actually managed to get a lot of things "right" with its design.

These slides from the Chrome OS Internals [0] talk provide a good overview.

[0] https://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides...

Google doesn't need to buy another smartphone OEM just as Apple doesn't need to buy Foxconn.

I'd not. Google has a greed that regularly leaves blatant information leaks unfixed for years.

For example, you still cannot safely use any third-party keyboard on Android. Because Google refuses to give users a way to block internet access for individual apps, and third-party keyboards by definition can read out your passwords and everything you type.

Would just as well be helpful for all kinds of other apps. I'd be much less concerned about giving my camera app permission to take pictures at any point in time, if I knew that it can't actually upload those to anywhere. But I can't. I have to blindly trust my camera app for no reason other than Google not wanting to give up potential ad revenue.

they do have the cash.

but, who or what gives Google the capability to write a new OS? (e.g. are they currently employing a group of highly experienced, top-notch OS engineers? have they formed these engineers into an effective, efficient team? etc.)

Google is a NSA/Intelligence agency facade, nothing more nothing less. You only have to look at the PRISM program documents to understand this simple fact.

Read this: https://www.slashgear.com/google-fuchsia-dev-team-android-pa...

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