Alternative OS of Android: Huawei begins testing Fuchsia OS on the Kirin 970-based Honor Play

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few months, you’ve probably heard about the Fuchsia operating system Google is currently developing. While Google has yet to speak publicly about the project, we know it is open source, and development is slowly but steadily going forward. Many speculate that, eventually, Fuchsia will replace the Android operating system completely, and possibly even Chrome OS too. However, without a word from Google, we’re yet to know Fuchsia’s exact purpose. While the operating system is still, in its current state, far from finished, we now know Huawei will possibly be one of the first OEMs on board the Fuchsia train, as the company is allegedly test-driving the secretive OS on the Honor Play.

A new commit in the Fuchsia source code has revealed that Huawei has managed to boot the Zircon kernel on the Honor Play. The Zircon kernel–separate from the Linux kernel Android is based on–in its finished state will serve as Fuchsia’s kernel, so while it is still a far cry from a finished, usable operating system, it is definitely a good starting point. The patch itself adds support for the HiSilicon Kirin 970 SoC to the Zircon kernel, and the Honor Play is simply one of a handful of devices released by Huawei/Honor with this chipset. We also have the Huawei P20 lineup, the Huawei Mate 10 lineup, the Honor 10, the Honor View 10, and more. You can check out the relevant commit here.

This means little to the end consumer right now, since Fuchsia is not nearly finished and we have no clue when it will be. But this does mean that Huawei could be among the first OEMs to launch a Fuchsia-powered device when it does eventually come out, possibly in 2 or 3 years. Right now, though, it’s just a long work-in-progress and we’ll keep you updated as we know more about its development.