Huawei has been playing around with Google’s Fuschia OS with the Honor Play since late last year. Despite the ban, the Chinese tech giant is still interested in working with Fuschia OS. Google’s Fuschia has had foundation support for a couple of developer boards including HiKey 960 that is based around Kirin 960, Huawei’s in-house processor according to creator 96Boards.
Huawei developers had been silently working to bring improvements to Fuschia’s HiKey 960 support until the trade ban was enforced by the US President that meant they couldn’t access Google’s apps and services. The development came to a halt just like the alleged Huawei-branded Google Assistant-powered Smart Speaker the two companies were working on to be launched at this years IFA in Berlin.
That was the case until yestermorning when a Huawei developer joined in on a Fuschia Gerrit source code management. The developer had both a Gmail account and a Huawei email account which implies that Huawei is back on track with Fuschia.
The developer asked if there are new steps to build only Zircon. Zircon is a base layer and part of Fuschia four distinct parts(Zircon, Garnet, Peridot, and Topaz) From the question, it looks like Huawei is interested in the microkernel as the developer is asking for instructions on how to build on that portion.
This recent revelation is quite interesting. Huawei is either looking to use the microkernel(even though Huawei’s HongMengOS has its own microkernel) which comes with its advantages such as it’s slimmed down nature unlike other OS including Android, Windows and macOS or prepping itself incase Fuschia OS goes live.
Only time will tell.
