
Google’s “Fuchsia” smartphone OS dumps Linux, has a wild new UI - jbk
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smartphone-os-dumps-linux-has-a-wild-new-ui/
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remir
Right now, if you want to order concert tickets or pay your parking meter, you
need specific dedicated apps. The result of this is rows and rows of single-
purpose apps "silos" on you phone, having to create an account and entering
your credit card for each of them. I think some folks at Google got bored of
that and wondered "what's next?".

Ultimately, what we want is not the app itself (the silo), but what the app
enables (what's inside). I don't want to download a parking meter app, I just
want to pay for parking. I don't want to download LiveNation's app. I just
want to order concert tickets. The system should be able to generate an
interface that allows me to do x,y,z depending on context, without having to
manage credit cards, adresse and accounts.

Chatbots are here, personal assistant, too. You can use your messaging app to
order stuff, find answers or send money to your friends. The writing is on the
wall: single-purpose apps are not the future and chatbots and AI assistant
potentially means less Google search and ad click.

So Google figured that re-purposing Android to fit this new paradigm would be
an impossible task so they just said fuck it! Let's start from scratch with a
solid base. Let's design a platform that will be everywhere, runs on
everything, update silently like Chrome, and is made with AI in mind.

~~~
knz
> I don't want to download a parking meter app, I just want to pay for
> parking. I don't want to download LiveNation's app. I just want to order
> concert tickets.

All of these use cases _should_ be easily solved by a decent web UI running in
a browser without the need for a native app?

~~~
remir
Absolutely. Progressive web apps are great for this, but like I mentioned,
chatbots and AI assistants are emerging. That doesn't mean the web is dead,
but if more and more people are using chatbots and assistants like Alexa to do
stuff, that could be problematic for Google as less people will see ads and
download apps.

I'm talking about Google's perspective here. I'm not saying this is where the
entire industry should go.

~~~
tmzt
Yep.

It was interesting to see another company using 'Skills' to describe their AI
addons. I see the same thing applying to mobile apps, essentially services
that also describe a minimal UI but leave the communication, notification, and
other components up to the underlying environment. Essentially a user agent
that decides what I want to see, and then sorts through the proposals from the
various skills and let's through only what it knows I will be interested in.

Advertising is a concern, but it will take the same level of breakthrough that
text-based ads did. It will be completely obvious only once it has been
accomplished.

The use cases mentioned above are both time and location sensitive making this
"sorting" process easier for the agent.

Parking meters make sense when you are parked in front of them, and can
justify taking up a large portion of your screen, turning the display on if
it's out of your pocket, propose an actual transaction, etc.

Ticket sales might be notifying you when a desired event is coming up, such as
a play or music act, and then offering to monitor the ticket prices or offer
you the opportunity to buy through a loyalty program from one of your credit
cards or phone carriers.

The important thing is that skills can expose spoken, UI-based, chat-based,
location and driving state dependent interfaces.

Thinking of simply an application which runs on a screen, runs a service in
the background or requires a complicated notification system which it
primarily uses to capture as much of your attention as possible is quickly
becoming outdated.

Games will still be apps, but not much else.

~~~
remir
You explained it better than I did. "Skills" is really the key word, here.

For example, a man could tell the AI assistant that he wants to send flowers
to his wife at her office for her birthday. The florists in the area could
simply connect their stores to Google's AI, so Fuchsia could then generate an
interface with relevant selection of flowers.

The man then taps what he wants, confirm, and the system handles payment and
shipping info. Done. The interface closes automatically and he can go on with
his day.

No app to download, no credit card to enter, no new account to create.

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niftich
At first I had a lot of trouble making sense of the UI, but now I think it's
pretty neat. It's essentially the final form of the Material Design idea,
where each app is a Card like a physical deck of playing cards, and you get to
arrange them by dragging them around, with the important and intentional
limitation that they snap into one of a finite number of arrangements. How do
you undo a splitscreen or tabbed layout, though?

The rest is just mockups at this point, I hope; for example, the control
center is pretty rough: presumably the user knows their own location, and when
they're looking at this screen, they probably don't care; the full date is
hidden whereas most people forget today's date much more often than they
forget their own location; there is no obvious way to do auto-brightness, the
negative space is in all the wrong places; etc.

~~~
wruza
Honestly (and with no attack), material design seems like a nonsense to me. I
tried to use demo sites and gmail, but I simply can't get it. It has no
response in my mind, it doesn't catch my eye. The only thing it does brightly
is disturbing my perception via after-click wave effect, idk how to call it
properly.

I wish to know if there are many people like me, and what's special in MD for
those who actually love it.

------
type0
The best part of Fuchsias UI is their Armadillo logo.

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choroid
What does google gain from ditching linux?

~~~
frozenport
Linux system internal are ugly, there is little progress on static driver
verification, resource management heuristics are poorly tuned, and the kernel
network stack is so bad, you can make a living selling your own user space
version. Linux has a lot of very real problems.

~~~
sargun
I'm really curious as to where you find the kernel's network stack
problematic? Can you explain that in more detail?

Also, what issues do you have with the scheduler?

~~~
frozenport
[https://blog.cloudflare.com/kernel-
bypass/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/kernel-bypass/)

For an example among many. Basically network data should magically appear in
bulk, whereas in Linux it's almost one packet at a time.

As you move to 10G, thus start to eat a lot of cpu.

~~~
angry_octet
Not really a problem for mobile... For HPC there have been user mode and
offload tweaks since _forever_. The fact that none of the hardware or task
specific techniques can replace the traditional BSD sockets stack is because
writing that in general is a ton of work... Work which G would have to do ^10
to replace Linux in an android context.

~~~
frozenport
Wasted cycles are directly proportional to power consumption.

------
Arun2009
If anyone else is wondering like I did how to pronounce it, visit this link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrbZSYlR_bM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrbZSYlR_bM)
. It's apparently the name of a shrub and also a color:
[http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fuchsia](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fuchsia)

I unfortunately kept pronouncing it "fucks-yeah" in my mind and was wondering
why on earth would google name it as such, until I discovered that it's
actually "fyushya".

------
TeeWEE
Note: You can play with the UI on your android phone:
[http://www.mediafire.com/file/wpjxvjwd236cfz1/Armadillo.apk](http://www.mediafire.com/file/wpjxvjwd236cfz1/Armadillo.apk)

Since flutter is a cross platform UI framework.

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TeeWEE
I played with Flutter before, and it is such a nice way to build mobile apps.
Its based on react, its like react native but it has its own rendering engine.

And i can also image apps to be loaded directly from the web (ala like a
browser).

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ohiovr
Hopefully, they can somehow improve standby battery power longevity.

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forgottenpass
edit: nevermind

~~~
nopit
Wow, so contrarian!

