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Everything We Knew About Fuchsia's UI, Armadillo, Is Gone (9to5google.com) 86

Over the last two years, we have heard numerous reports about Fuchsia, a new operating system for phones, computers, and just about everything else by Google. We've seen it in a variety of demos, all of which featured a UI, codenamed "Armadillo." Now it seems that Armadillo, and thus everything about Fuchsia we've "seen," has been removed. Reader Suren Enfiajyan shares a report: Everything we've known Fuchsia to look like falls under Armadillo. Last May, when we got our first look at Fuchsia UI, it was possible because Armadillo was simply a Flutter app that could be built to run on Android. After some months, we were also able to show off the first five minutes of Fuchsia UI on the Pixelbook using Fuchsia's screenshot tool, and we saw improvements to Armadillo, like Google Sign-In support. All in all, it was clear Fuchsia was shaping up to become a clean operating system that implements and extends Material Design. Unfortunately, none of the demos and examples are accurate anymore. With a recent code change, humorously titled "Armadillo fainted!", spotted by Redditor alawami, we've reached the end of an era. Every single piece of Armadillo code has now been permanently removed from Fuchsia's Topaz repo.
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Everything We Knew About Fuchsia's UI, Armadillo, Is Gone

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  • by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @05:23PM (#57872896)
    It was open source. If really no one has a mirror it was not worth having!
    • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @05:52PM (#57872992) Journal
      If you want to look at the Fuschia source code, it's available here [github.com]. To me, it looks more like a college-level project, rather than a kernel that has come into contact with the messy realities of the real world.

      Their goal is to make things secure, and they want to do things 'right' by making it a micro-kernel.

      Again, to me it looks like the authors have good knowledge on the theory side of things, but lack understanding of a lot of real-world use cases. For example, they removed a lot of the syscalls that the Linux kernel has, it's not Posix compliant, and you really should think long and hard before removing things in a decades-old, well-tested standard.

      But who knows, maybe they'll get lucky and hit all the use cases Android needs. Maybe someone with experience will help them make the kernel solid. But most likely, the code will get uglier and uglier as it needs to accomodate more use cases, until it's so ugly that someone at Google starts a side project to replace it.
      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Well what you say it looks like is also roughly what it was meant to be. It was meant to be a concept/model OS, like what if we could start over and forget all the baggage we already have. Sometimes you manage to come up with really bright ideas when you start with blank sheets. If the new OS is so great you want it to take over you make some kind of legacy/compatilibility mode for the old, but more likely it'll be something like concept cars... some of the ideas will make it into production models. And som

    • by Anonymous Coward

      It wasn't worth having. The lack of options for phone OSes isn't the only issue--it's the lack of players as well. Armadillo was still Google. Google is still...ugh. We need someone else besides Google and Apple in the game. Microsoft tried and failed. Not that they were any better of an option. I'd say it's too little too late now anyway. Android and iOS dominate. Getting coders, telcos, device makers, and end users into the idea of a new OS is just too daunting at this point. Any entry into the market wou

      • One thing that always happens... The dominant players always fall. If someone was to come up with a secure phone OS that could still access the play store or the Apple ecosystem, it would sell. (Secure meaning I decide what access an app gets.)
  • by Anonymous Coward

    I don't go to funerals of people I've never heard about. I have even less interest in dead vaporware. The degradation of /. is complete.

  • perhaps this is an armadillo feinting...
  • They really cannot do anything except search (badly, but with a huge DB) and ads...

    This is obviously very far removed from their "vision" and "image", but in the end all Google management seems to care about is making money and only ads make money and search brings in the ads and improves targeting them. Oh, and they can operate a fairly vanilla mail-server and use it to get more information to target ads.

    As a provider of infrastructure or longer-term available services of any kind, Google is entirely the w

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      agreed that google is a selfish prick of a company and anything they offer to 'users' has strings attached. no doubts at all, they can't be trusted, they employ mostly young people, lacking in real world experience and google, overall, has the attention span of a teenager.

      android is total shit, from a tech POV. its not about users or user freedom, never was and never will be. the only thing android does well is deliver eyes and clicks to google's real customers, the corporations.

      given that they ruined th

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        android is total shit, from a tech POV. its not about users or user freedom, never was and never will be. the only thing android does well is deliver eyes and clicks to google's real customers, the corporations.

        given that they ruined their linux os and the update 'story' is worse than MS (and that says a lot, right there)

        This is perhaps the most striking evidence. I mean how can you support an OS _worse_ than MS? The mind boggles. Also agree about the young people with no real-world experience. These are easiest to manipulate and exploit, after all and these people will usually not realize when they are contributing to evil.

        • MS pulled out of the phone market on their own. Ironically, right about the time they finally figured out how to make a decent phone UI.

        • I mean how can you support an OS _worse_ than MS?

          Slightly OT:
          They had some help from Microsoft there, Windows used to be better but has gone downhill in the last years.

          Say what you will about pre-Win10 OSes from MS, they promised their 10 years (security) support from release and mostly kept that promise. I'm typing this on an older Win7 machine, and it still gets security updates. The biggest (and intentional) flaw is that new processor generations don't get these updates at all for Win7. Also, there are relatively few compatibility problems with the upd

      • " its not about users or user freedom"
        Well, you can argue no OS is except for those that are open source. Apple does seem to have a different business model (not involving user data) but I wouldn't call them user friendly. Meanwhile Microsoft is busy androidizing Windows 10 (user data gathering, integrating ads in the OS and several apps).
        I'm not excusing Android though, I'd be nice if I could pay some money and it be ad and spying-free but alas that's not so
  • of the magic lolipops in Santa Claus: The Motion Picture? Also, I dare you to find a more obscure reference.
  • Has 9To5 Google ever employed writers? Or has it always been like this?

  • The only thing you can rely on Google for is starting and dropping the majority of their projects according to whats trending on the hype train in tech media, vacuuming up your pi on a massive scale, and bleating about social justice.
  • Most did not see it coming

  • by msauve ( 701917 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:04PM (#57873806)
    Google being distracted by a new shiny thing and abandoning some project isn't news. Quite the opposite - it's entirely predictable. They lack adult supervision.
  • How could knowledge be erased from people's brains by a change to a code repository?
  • by matushorvath ( 972424 ) on Saturday December 29, 2018 @01:52PM (#57875760)

    Irrelevant project is irrelevant.

This is clearly another case of too many mad scientists, and not enough hunchbacks.

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