
Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android - RmDen
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/facebook-operating-system/
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protomyth
_By moving to its own OS, Facebook could have more freedom to bake social
interaction — and hopefully privacy — deeper into its devices._

Privacy? I expect some amazing detailed & intrusive data gathering.

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twiceaday
By 'Privacy' they mean they will be the only ones with access to your data.

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hurricanetc
Except for all the companies that accidentally leak it to, all the companies
that grab it in breaches, all the companies that find it sitting in S3, all
the companies they sell it to, etc.

But otherwise yes only Facebook will have it.

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mattynice
All the more reason to consider the HTC Vive or Steam Index if interested in
being an early adapter of VR where their achievements can be more
collaborative.

Side note regarding Portal and other "social hardware", I can't imagine there
being user-friendly privacy toggles when facebook owns the complete stack..

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baroffoos
Valve has done a pretty good job at standardizing VR tech with OpenVR/SteamVR.
All of the headsets except the oculus seem to have really good hardware
compatibility. The vive controllers can be used with the pimax hmd, etc.

Facebook seems to be trying really hard to create a lockin with the oculus, if
you buy games on the oculus store, you are now forever locked in to only
buying oculus hardware from now on.

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collias
Thankfully you can use Oculus devices (or at least, the Quest) with the new
Link feature to turn the headset into a sort of external display, which is
then compatible with SteamVR.

Honestly it's the biggest selling point of the Quest for me, in addition to
being able to hack around on it through an adb shell.

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Slippery_John
I doubt this will get much in the way of mainstream penetration. You're never
going to see any competitive phone installations of this. It'll probably
mostly be for things like portal. I doubt they'd be successful in doing a
chromebook competitor either given how horribly tarnished their name is, but
it does at least seem more realistic than a phone.

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behringer
You kidding? Free phones with Facebook OS built in all funded by selling every
scrap of your data? Third world countries are gonna eat that up to begin with,
and then it'll spread all over.

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WatchDog
Android privacy is bad enough as it is, I can't imagine how horrible a
facebook operating system would be.

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rb808
Wasn't there one like this already (though used android)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First)

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npo9
It’s an obvious vertical integration play to make an operating system for the
hardware you manufacturer.

I’d like to see an AR/VR first OS/UI.

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Apocryphon
Finally, a rival for Fuchsia.

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r00fus
Good luck with that, Mark.

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whoisjuan
For a company of the size of FB and its ambitions, this seems kind of late. I
would have thought they already had something like this.

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kerng
Mark Lucovsky is pretty legendary! Every Windows exe starts with the two bytes
ML!

EDIT: As others pointed out its actually another Mark, MZ. Lucovsky was the
Mark, who Steve Ballmer was throwing chairs around when he said to leave for
Google. Still legendary. :)

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umeshunni
That's MZ for Mark Zbikowski -
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zbikowski](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zbikowski)

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sjg007
Makes sense. It'll be a *nix variant probably.. we might get a nice new UI
layer out of it.

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tommyengstrom
Eye OS, because they will always be watching you?

