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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of what you think of Google, the reality is Fuchsia and Android have little to nothing in common. While they would certainly rather have a permissive language from the bottom up, they certainly wouldn't have written a whole new OS with that as the primary goal.

Android's platform design would arguably have been considered modern in 2007 or 2008, but it is 2019, and the cracks in Android's capabilities have been widening for a while. Sometimes people still think of Android as "newer" in the operating system space, but it's a decade old!

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> it's a decade old

Windows NT came out over 20 years ago, in 1993. The first public release of Linux was in 1991. And the BSDs trace back even longer, you could say back to the original Unix from 1969. So a decade is recent I'd say.

Windows NT development started in 1989. It was lead by Dave Cutler, who also lead VMS which started in 1975.

A decade isn't much for an operating system...

It is when you start thinking about our approach to security in 2019, versus our approach to security in 2009. And sometimes the baseline assumptions about how software is written makes it exceedingly hard to, in flight, rebuild for our new understanding of what is needed for good security.

Attempts to do so often entail more or less, tacking on a whole different environment, as Microsoft has attempted with UWP. To a certain degree, it'd be easier to just start over from scratch, as Google is attempting to do.

Microsoft is still at it, just from the other side, by merging Win32 and UWP containers.

We mainly changed our focus from protecting multiple users from each other to protecting multiple applications from each other. But Android always had the latter model. Apart from that I don't think a lot has changed from 2009 to 2019?

given that capabilities were considered by many the future of security in the 1970s, you could say that the community understood full well how to provide a fine-grained policy machine with good enforcement guarantees.

either they or the organizations paying the bills just didnt care yet.

It took me some time to form the argument. I dont really see how fuschia targets linux on the server or windows on the desktop, it is never mentioned to be the on the backend and no features are ground-breaking for the backend. All the usecases are for mobile platforms - the android. Ok it may be the case android and fucsia have no common code, no common architecture and no common people.

But that does not mean that they dont target the same devices, the same market and the same use-cases.

No arguing with that - yes, selinux/uid permissions were somewhat wonky. But google did the job and paid its price isolating the programs and it works right now. Can we consider the problem of android app isolation aldready solved?

If you're an android dev, you know google basically rewrite the whole SDK for every major OS release. Android 1.0 is unrecognizable compared to Android 28.0 to the point where supporting devices running 1.0 from a 28.0 is a tedious and time-expensive operation.

Did you mean SDK 28? There was no Android 28.0 as this was posted.

There aren't any API level 1 devices out there though. Supporting, say, Android 4 (level 14, from 2011 so almost eight years ago!) is very straightforward. The fragmentation argument doesn't hold water for most apps.

maybe if you have a simple text app, try implementing background sync, modern UIs even db stuff gets really convoluted really quickly. forget about camera/audio support

my current company supports down to only api level 19 and even then it's like having to maintain multiple apps to support apis <23

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