Google's secret OS has got a face

Google has been secretly working on an operating system for the past few months. It was known that the OS is known as Fuchsia, as posted on GitHub by a page of the same name. It was speculated to replace the ChromeOS or bring a combination of Android and ChromeOS to all devices running on Google’s software. Now though, we can have a rough idea about the developing OS’ appearance.

Thanks to ArsTechnica, we now know that the Fuchsia OS will host the Armadillo UI, which is inspired by the Material Design language from the Android versions of today. In the video, the OS is supposed to have a giant vertically scrolling home screen. In the centre, you'll see a window for the user’s profile picture, the date, city name, and a battery icon. Above are the "Story" cards showcasing Recent Apps and below it is a scrolling list of suggestions brought by Google. In fact, it is sort of like a Google Now placeholder. If you scroll up or down the main screen, you'll see a small white circle at the bottom of the screen, representing the home button.

Apart from that colourful interface, it is also known that the Fuchsia OS will dump the Linux-based kernel and opt for Google’s own Magenta kernel. The apps for Fuchsia will run on Google’s Flutter SDK, which can make it possible to make the same set of codes, i.e. apps, run on multiple operating systems. So, an app written with the help of the Flutter SDK can be made to run on Android, ChromeOS, iOS and Fuchsia too. The apps need to be written in Dart, a modern programming language that is claimed to be familiar to developers writing app codes in Java or Javascript.

Right now, it’s anyone’s guess as to what will Fuchsia be? Could it be the next evolution of the massively popular Android OS? Or can it be a unified platform for all the devices that plan to operate on Google’s codes? Only time can tell.