Google has been quietly working on integrating its experimental Fuchsia operating system with Android devices. However, this integration is not happening in the way many had speculated or hoped for.
Instead of replacing Android outright or deeply integrating Fuchsia into the core of Android, Google is taking a more subtle approach. The company is developing a stripped-down version of Fuchsia called “microfuchsia” that will run on Android devices in a virtual machine.
This microfuchsia build is designed to be bootable in virtualization solutions like QEMU and pKVM. pKVM is the hypervisor for Android’s Virtualization Framework (AVF), which Google introduced in Android 13 to securely run certain types of workloads in an isolated environment.
It’s speculated that microfuchsia could handle tasks that Android needs to execute securely, potentially doing so faster or more optimally than Android’s existing microdroid virtual machine. However, Google has not officially confirmed the exact use case for microfuchsia on Android.
Patches have been submitted to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) that lay the groundwork for a new APEX file to contain microfuchsia. APEX is the file format used by Project Mainline to package system components.
So in summary, while Fuchsia is coming to Android, it will be in a limited capacity running in a virtual machine rather than deeply integrated into the operating system. This suggests Google’s plans for Fuchsia as a full Android replacement are likely on hold or significantly scaled back from earlier speculation.
The development of microfuchsia does show Google is still actively working on Fuchsia and exploring ways to integrate it with Android. But for now, Fuchsia’s role seems to be more as an experimental platform than a full-fledged successor to Android on smartphones and other devices.
