Does google actually plan to do replace android with that, or is it a "you've burnt out on what we hired you for, but letting you leave would give our competitors a leg up so do whatever you want" project? It really feels like the latter.

It's a platform for IoT devices. Whether it ends up in consumer handhelds remains to be seen.

No, it's not. It's already booting into a desktop like UI on the Pixelbook and they've even ported parts of Chrome to it.

It's more like some universal OS for Google products that'll probably be ready for launch in 2-3 years or so. Sure, IoT may be one of the goals of Fuchsia, but I'm sure it's meant for future phones as a step by step replacement for Android and future Chromebooks, probably starting with Pixel devices or whatever they'll rebrand to next year.

Everyone knew Android made technical compromises for market share (eg security model).

It remains to be seen whether business (legacy Android) or technical (new system arch) will win out at Google.

Regardless if Fuchsia has a future, it's highly unlikely that they'll want to stick with Android for over another decade.

source ?

Just the idea of a smartphone OS being around for over twenty years.

I think we're on the cusp of a lot of rules changing in that regard. The stagnation of Moore's law would result in some degree of stagnation in software architecture.

We're at the mercy of chip process engineers to a greater degree than is generally recognized.

Well I would have said the same before the last versions of Android have aimed at paving the way for the 10 years to come.

Stuff like project Treble have taken most of the engineering time on that release .. it seems that at least for now the plan is to still have Android in 10 years

(it should be noted that Fuchsia and Flutter are AFAIK teams that are completely separate from the Android framework team)

And well, the state of the OS is .. ok I guess ? Like all projects of this size, building APIs is building future regret.

Some can be rewritten. Some are so bad they are revamped. Some are meh but not bad enough to warrant the trouble of changing them.

The smartphone market has stabilized. And once the hardware stabilizes, the OS almost never changes. Source? OS/360, MS DOS, Windows.

It depends on how permissive Fuchsia becomes, and whether Google wants to play nice or not — at this point it could go either way. The sticking points (I think) will be security policy and market positioning.

What will be in Google's interest?