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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Google has a history of introducing products and then killing them. For developing mobile apps they currently support "vendor native" via Android Studio using Java or Kotlin, Progressive Web Apps, and now Flutter.

Will Google really support all three over the long term?

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If you consider APIs that power its businesses, Google's support history is a lot better. Dart and Closure were never popular outside Google, but they're still invested in because they are used internally.

Android and Chrome are both heavily invested in by Google, with massive external ecosystems too. Speaking in a personal capacity with no insider knowledge, I'd be shocked if Google stopped supporting either.

The UI for Fuchsia is written in Flutter, so it's got a pretty big internal customer too: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/topaz/+/HEAD/shell/

Meanwhile they are adding Fuchsia support to ART, so go figure.

You mean the OS that is developed independently from Android with completely separate teams and that nobody knows where it will be in 2 years ?

Since this is Google we are talking about, no warranty that this will ever go on one of their flagship phones.

That's just a senior dev retention project.

Or maybe not, and that's Android vNext.

I want to note that Dart and Flutter are being used for Fuchsia it seems like[0]. I'm pretty sure that Fuchsia is a big project Google is not going to abandon so Dart and Flutter are probably safe.

There is the chance of them throwing it away maybe noting it as an experiment on the way to whatever they land on inside Fuchsia but the amount of developer ire they would draw is hard to imagine.

[0]: https://9to5google.com/2018/03/02/fuchsia-friday-first-fuchs...

Fuchsia is to Google as Tizen is to Samsung... something keep in the back pocket for a worst-case legal total war, but unlikely to see any real world use.

Really? but Fuchsia isn't just a mobile operating system -- I think they want to own all the software at almost every level. I wouldn't be surprised if they started running their own hardware and laptops with Fuchsia as well if it was good enough.

It's a bit cynical but I think they might even want to just bin linux as a base for Android and migrate off of it completely, get their notebooks/chromebooks on Fuchsia, and make a play for OSes to run on. Think of how much data they could get for the industrial advertising complex at the OS level.

> I think they want to own all the software at almost every level

That's what everyone wants to do. Guess what, Google might be big, but Android is big because Google has many partners.

If they try to pull that off, all their partners will drop them like a hot potato.

And I agree with you it's probably to ditch Linux cause Linux has too much political baggage, i.e. they want to fully control Fuchsia.

For us, it's probably better if Fuchsia fails.

> If they try to pull that off, all their partners will drop them like a hot potato.

At that point, will they have a choice? I mean most partners already bow to Google's control over AOSP -- if they said tomorrow that android was actually switching to run on top of fuchsia (let's say they did all the work to make it happen, so it was "seamless"), everyone would just be like... "ok".

While I'm not sure I necessarily want Fuchsia to fail, I'm 100% with you on it being likely better for the world if google didn't own everything...

Lets put it this way, Google already made most of the work with Treble and yet it isn't being adopted as they thought it would, making them finally take a stance regarding updates.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/11/an-update-...

From my point of view it looks a big internal politics war.

Whoever wins, we loose.

What we loose if Android side wins?

A Java fork failing to keep up with standard Java, winning on where Microsoft failed (aka Google J++), thus forcing Java library authors to either write two versions or constrain themselves to the common subset.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other Java vendors that are able to create their own Java implementations and play ball with the rest of the eco-system.

Maybe that's not that bad, considering the fraction of Java libraries that used simultaneously in Android and Java ecosystems isn't very large. OTOH if Fuchsia wins, we loose the open source mobile OS, the major one, the only one, with tons of apps and ways to ungoogle.

On the other hand, we'll finally have an empirical resolution to the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate!

Intel already did that for us with the Management Engine.

And if you squint a bit through how modern Treble drivers work, Google has turned their Linux usage into a kind of micro-kernel OS flavour.

https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/hidl

Since Kotlin on Android Studio is 100% JetBrains IP, I wouldn't be worried on that front.

What you think they want to let Facebook control mobile development?

Google rarely kill open source projects.

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