Google’s secretive Fuchsia OS is open for contributions

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  Here's what Fuchsia looked like in 2018. This is the home screen in phone mode. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Google's super secret, experimental in-development operating system, Fuchsia, is still alive. Google recently put out a blog post titled "Expanding Fuchsia's open source model" announcing that the company is now accepting public contributions and bug fixes for whatever this OS ends up being. There is now a public mailing list, a public bug tracker, and even a roadmap.

Google says it has "been developing Fuchsia in the open, in our git repository for the last four years." That's not quite how I would describe the development process. After we compiled Fuchsia and got it running on a Pixelbook, the Fuchsia team scrubbed the repo of the user interface. I would guess Fuchsia has a similar setup to Android, with a public-facing repository full of the bits Google is willing to disclose, and a private repo where all the interesting stuff happens. Either that or Google has done zero interface work in the last two years, and Fuchsia development is slower than anyone was expecting—I don't see any user interface code in the repo. There is a public bug tracker, but many of the bugs are labeled "Restrict-View-Google" and are not visible to non-employees.

The blog post includes what might be the first official picture of Fuchsia: a thrilling gif of a command line running a "Hello World" app:

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