I worked at Google up until 2017. In the last year or two of my time there I had many conversation with some people who worked for or were adjacent to the Fuchsia team. It's hard to believe it's been 6 years. We're now talking billions (quite literally) of dollars later and all we've got to show for it is an OS for the Nest?

The core of the technical leadership on Fuchsia were, I believe, Android refugees so they had a very Android-centric way of looking at the world. The two premises for Fuchsia seemed to be:

1. There is no way to remove devices drivers from the Linux kernel. That goal was seen as desirable in terms of improving reliability, how long devices were supported for and the time taken to roll out updates. Upstreaming driver changes was something phone manufacturers just didn't do and didn't want to do. Linux has no stable ABI for device drivers; and

2. The Android ecosystem itself needed a reboot. This one is harder to define but, for example, you had duplication of services between the all-but-dead AOSP and Play services.

Remember these are statements of fact. These are my impression of the beliefs of Fuchsia technical leadership.

Google had always had hopes that there would be a healthy ecosystem of phone manufacturers. For awhile there were but now? Now it's really just Samsung. Samsung and Google, much like the Wintel alliance of Microsoft and Intel years ago, was an unhappy marriage of convenience. Samsung had tried (and repeatedly failed) to make their own OS. And Google didn't like Samsung being the consumer face of Android.

So the question I raised was: given that Samsung in an unhappy spouse in a loveless marriage of necessity, how are you going to convince Samsung to switch to Fuchsia? I still see no answer to that.

Maybe something interesting and useful will come out of Fuchsia eventually. I for one am not holding my breath however. It screams of being the pet project of some very high level engineers.