Google primarily makes its money selling ads, but it diverts that money into all sorts of unusual projects. Tiny robots, quantum computing, emoji equality, and more are part of Google’s purview, and lately, in public, the company’s been doing something strange. Namely, it’s been creating an operating system called ‘Fuchsia,’ although nobody can figure out just what the heck the system is for.
Nerds have been following Fuchsia on GitHub, the Internet’s backup dumpster for computer code, with interest. Fuchsia’s not built on the same code, Linux, that underpins Android and Chrome OS, and it appears to be designed to, among other things, interact with routers and “smart” home devices like lightbulbs and fridges. But it can also target computers and smartphones above a certain CPU speed. In other words, Fuchsia is able to talk to both your fridge and your high end smartphone, likely with the goal of being able to make them communicate. It might even allow some devices to use the processors of others temporarily to do some tasks, you know, in case your fridge needs to figure out the 1000th value of Pi.
All of it points to Fuchsia being Google’s attempt to unify its sprawling network of devices, or at least create things that can talk to everything Google has its fingers in. There’s a huge pile of smartphones, Chromebooks, Chromecasts, and other technology running Google’s various operating systems. It’s something that Google has needed to streamline for a while. It’s a bit absurd that if you have a Chromebook and an Android phone, the two can’t talk to each other. We’ll see, however, just how Google plans to use Fuchsia in the future.
(Via The Verge)
