My understanding with Fuchsia was to do better than Linux/Android in terms of security, scalability, and adaptability across devices. Why wouldn't they want to own a great OS full-stack? It's part of their bread & butter.
> My understanding with Fuchsia was to do better than Linux/Android in terms of security, scalability, and adaptability across devices.
That's the theory and the marketing copy. Since Fuchsia has only been tried on a few closed-world embedded devices (Nest hub, Nest camera), it is really too soon to declare it more secure, more scalable, or more adaptable. [By "closed-world" I mean the devices run only a limited set of apps, with functionality known ahead of time and from known developers.]
> Why wouldn't they want to own a great OS full-stack? It's part of their bread & butter.
It's not their bread and butter. Their bread and butter is web advertisement. 80-90% of all money they make comes from web advertisement.
Someone in the company said "we need vertical integration like Apple has and we don't like Android", and for a while they managed to run with it. Now they lost the internal power struggle. Oh well. It never had any tangible value to Google as a company anyway.
Android is a hugely important piece to Google. It’s pretty clearly the case for a wide variety of reasons, some of which is because they want to control the browser/app experience on mobile as much as Desktop in order to fuel those ads.
Android itself of course makes billions alone, which is enough to justify Fuschia. They need a better setup to compete with Apple specifically on decoupling the OS from the drivers for updates on 3rd party manufacturers, in addition to security. I think there’s even some thought it could run in the data center - that drives everything Google. They already employ entire teams that just work on the Linux kernel, compilers, etc. All of that is bread and butter.
> Android itself of course makes billions alone, which is enough to justify Fuschia.
Ads are 80% of Google's revenue. Literally nothing else is Google's bread an butter. There's even speculation that Google makes more money from the search deal with Apple than from the entire Android ecosystem.
Android is a vehicle for Google's ads, and suffers from the company's rollercoaster of "interested/not interested" over the years.
Fuchsia by this time is just a 6-year-old money sink with no revenue story.
That's the theory and the marketing copy. Since Fuchsia has only been tried on a few closed-world embedded devices (Nest hub, Nest camera), it is really too soon to declare it more secure, more scalable, or more adaptable. [By "closed-world" I mean the devices run only a limited set of apps, with functionality known ahead of time and from known developers.]