As a quick recap, Fuchsia is an operating system — like Android, macOS, or Windows — developed by Google as an open source project. While Google had been fairly secretive about the project over the years — despite its open nature — the Fuchsia team recently opened the door for developers to contribute to the project, which aims, among other things, to create a secure operating system not built on Linux.
Despite not running on Linux, Google has recently unveiled a proposal for how Fuchsia could still run apps written for Linux platforms, including Android apps, while maintaining security and safety. Between this capability and the wide variety of devices that Fuchsia has been tested on, some believe Fuchsia has the potential to be a unifying OS from Google that can run on almost anything, including phones, laptops, and internet-of-things devices.
Following Google’s usual development and release flow, dogfood should be the last stage of testing before reaching the public. If that final internal test goes well, it’s entirely possible that Google could move forward with bringing Fuchsia to developers sooner rather than later.
That said, I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a Google I/O 2020 reveal. The fishfood stage seemed to take a minimum of four months, at least between April and August 2019, and there was six months of teamfood testing between at least August 2019 and February 2020. Surely a much wider dogfood test would take just as long, if not longer, putting its end date into the latter half of the year.
But what actually goes into Google preparing a new version of something for release? Let’s use Chromium — and therefore Chrome and Chrome OS — as an example.
Periodically, a particular day’s build of Chromium will be selected as the branching-off point for a future release. These future releases are usually referred to as “milestones,” and are often shortened, such as Chrome 90 being referred to as “M90.”
From there, Googlers will selectively pull code changes from the “master” branch and add branch-specific changes to make that particular release more stable ahead of launch. You can see thousands of examples of this branching process in the Chromium source, dating back to 2014.
So then, what is “F1”? Keeping in mind that Fuchsia should now be well past the dogfood stage of testing, and that Chromium/Chrome uses short names like “M90,” it seems quite clear that “releases/F1” should be something of a first milestone release of Fuchsia.
Better yet, roughly six weeks after the F1 branch appeared — the same length of time that separated major updates to Chrome until recently — a similar “releases/F2” branch appeared in the Fuchsia source. Looking further ahead, the Fuchsia bug tracker even has issues tagged to be fixed in a later “F3” release.
From all of this we can say with relative confidence that Google’s Fuchsia OS is approaching its first proper release in a tangible way, with a potentially regular schedule of milestone releases after that.
But what will these first releases of Fuchsia entail? Last time we saw a bit of Fuchsia OS in action, back in 2019, the once-sleek UI of “Armadillo” had been removed and replaced with a bare-bones experience.
