Written by On May 10th 2023, Google finally took the wraps off yet another attempt at making its own tablet. After the relative success of the Nexus 7 and Pixel Slate’s attempt to take on Apple, I think Google stopped caring to be compared and to be competing directly with an iPad. Why? As mentioned by Verge and numerous other outlets, Pixel Tablet does not have a first-party keyboard or stylus offerings. At all.
You might be wondering what does this have to do with Fuchsia OS? I’m glad you asked! Every Pixel Tablet will ship with the speaker dock accessory included in the box. That speaker and a tablet mounted on it look exactly like an upgraded version of Google’s Nest Hub Max. So it would make sense to say that Google is competing with the likes of Amazon Echo Show 10 and are betting on tablet usage primarily around the house. What better way to kill upgrade the Nest lineup, than to introduce an Android tablet that can work as both a stationary assistant for your smart home and a tablet for media consumption?
Fuchsia OS
In order to explain my reasoning for this article, let me refresh your memory on Fuchsia OS in a brief paragraph.
Fuchsia is an open-sourced operating system, developed by Google from the ground up, based on a custom kernel that debuted in 2016 and was initially intended to slowly take over and replace Android as a more capable and scalable OS that can run on anything from toasters to computers. Fast forward to May 2021, and Fuchsia was rolled out to the first consumer product… Nest Hub. End users can’t see the difference between Cast OS that their Nest Hubs used to run and the new Fuchsia OS and that was by design.
Trouble in paradise?
If you searched Nest Hub unusable since Fuchsia, you will see a lot of discussion on both Reddit and Google’s own forums about crashes and general stability of Nest Hub devices since the update. You might just discount this to growing pains of a brand new operating system and I would generally agree with you.
However, with March 2022 arriving, Chris McKillop, director of Fuchsia development departed. Then came January 2023 layoffs inside the Fuchsia department and as much as 16% of the workforce was laid off.
Are you starting to see the pattern? Given Google’s track record in unceremoniously killing projects, it is almost a certainty, with the new Pixel Tablet announcement that Fuchsia OS is dead to Google. They might just wait to kill it by the end of the year or it’s already dead. Of course, it is just a speculative prediction, but given everything mentioned above, I am almost certain Fuchsia OS is dead.
Hopefully, I am wrong. What are y’all thoughts? Did you know Fuchsia OS was out in the wild for almost two years? Do you think Android needs a replacement OS?