Honestly from the outside looking in when you look at the big picture I don’t find it that much of a mystery. Long term plans are a unified model of computing under the Fuschia umbrella which is going to run everywhere from iot to servers. I don’t think they are subtle about wanting to control the entire stack of computing.
All the pieces are already in place (in various early stage forms) to make that move eventually from Android and Linux to Fuschia.
Additionally, I think everyone sees Flutter for web as some kind of joke right now but it seems pretty clear to me that this too is an early stage play to kill the idea of “native apps that live inside a closed garden App Store environment”.
I think we are close to seeing a world where the internet (as most people use it) is going to be moving away from the traditional document based browser approach to something a bit more app centric before long.
I find things like the Chrome team’s project Fugu suddenly make a LOT more sense when you start looking elsewhere at other things that seem unrelated at first (K8s, Fuschia and a few others come to mind).
They are all aiming to meet in the middle before long. People are already saying Safari is the new IE for example and I think that is about to become much more apparent in the next couple of years.
Eh kind of but you are mixing the OS with the application framework to make it look like more things exist.
PWA for ChromeOS,
Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform),
JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out).
So really it's three.
PWAs, Flutter, and Jetpack Compose.
Of which I think PWAs rightly exist alongside a native solution.
Flutter is sort of the odd one out and not sure where it will be long term. Although it's becoming more clear Fuchsia is probably going to be for IoT devices, so I could see Flutter being used as an application framework for them (which IMHO makes a lot of sense.)
>PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out). So really it's three.
I don't think the parents point is that all those are frameworks.
Rather that they have two many frameworks and platforms, with no coherent unified platform strategy (Apple's iOS, macOS, ipadOS, watchOS are all the same under the hood, and their UI frameworks are also unified or getting there fast).
Listing 5 items and having vs between them clearly puts them against each other.
And that seems more like a marketing issue, under the hood there actually are differences between macOS and iOS. Catalyst hopes to fix this but it's still pretty rocky imho. Google also did something similar with running Android apps on chromeOS.
iPadOS, iOS and watchOS would be the same for Android phones, tablets and watches. So it doesn't seem like a fair comparison here.
I don't see Apple being big in the web space as much so Google really wanting to push PWAs vs Apple's stance is different. Although Apple seems to be fine with PWAs to a degree, so it would be the same for them too.
Apple really doesn't seem to care to support things outside their ecosystem (it doesn't benefit them like it does Google.) So you probably aren't going to see a multiplatform library from them.
I always thought Dart/Flutter was a hedge against Oracle shutting down Java-usage on Android. Now that they have Kotlin (which devs generally much prefer over the Java-facsimile Dart) and Jetpack, I'm not sure either what relevance Dart/Flutter has to Android.
All the pieces are already in place (in various early stage forms) to make that move eventually from Android and Linux to Fuschia.
Additionally, I think everyone sees Flutter for web as some kind of joke right now but it seems pretty clear to me that this too is an early stage play to kill the idea of “native apps that live inside a closed garden App Store environment”.
I think we are close to seeing a world where the internet (as most people use it) is going to be moving away from the traditional document based browser approach to something a bit more app centric before long.
I find things like the Chrome team’s project Fugu suddenly make a LOT more sense when you start looking elsewhere at other things that seem unrelated at first (K8s, Fuschia and a few others come to mind).
They are all aiming to meet in the middle before long. People are already saying Safari is the new IE for example and I think that is about to become much more apparent in the next couple of years.