This seems to be new (circumstantial) evidence that Fuchsia is supposed to eventually replace Linux in Android.
What we can clearly see here is that an Android replacement must be able to either run Android apps / games or have the same officially supported version of this said app / game, (Like Adobe Photoshop Express or Pokémon GO for iOS or Android or ‘New Platform’)
The first route is the quickest for them to support the existing Android app ecosystem from day 1 or the alternative is to rewrite these apps for this new OS platform which takes years. The former route was the obvious choice for them.
This was true even for Microsoft.
Windows NT/2000/XP was effectively a new operating system that was able to run Windows applications.
Microsoft worked very hard to reproduce old bugs and undefined behaviors so that old binaries will continue working on the new Windows.
I think Windows 2000 didn't have nearly as much compatibility work as XP.
I guess Windows 95 came out because NT was a lot for a 386 or 486? And also different priorities as far as compatibility.
Additional useful reading: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120102-00/?p=87...
You had to enable it with regsvr32 /enable slayerui.dll or something like that.
Yes, supporting apps for a competing platform gives some developers a convenient excuse to not develop for your platform specifically. But you still get the benefit of their work for the other platform. And not supporting those apps gives users a solid reason to not use your platform at all.
I could maybe justify the current iteration of Pinephone as an experiment, try and make an app and buy it through my company as a freelancer, but Purism would need to have quite a few major apps before I could justify the cost. My heart wants me to support these projects. It almost feels like a moral imperative if we want to actually own and control our mobile hardware ever.
But it almost feels like going off and living in the woods to save the environment, the altenative needs a few more of the mod cons for any kind of serious adoption.
This has genuinely caused me a lot of anguish.
I'm considering trying to drop my day job hours to 4 days so I have more freedom for side projects and this might be the nudge I needed.
OS/2 was never really successful outside of that domain.
It depends on how you define "replace", I suppose, but Windows really seems to have less and less importance in a lot of spaces.
On the other hand, Apple has been very careful to include this sort of "backwards compatibility" in all their systems for a while. It's usually not maintained as long as Microsoft does, but from m68k -> ppc -> i386 -> amd64 -> armv8 they're always supported at least the last architecture and runtime, so early OS X could run apps from System 7/8/9.