Honor Play running Google’s Fuchsia OS spotted

There have been talks of Google developing a brand new operating system to replace Android and Chrome OS in near future. The new software is called Fuschia and is said to be years away from seeing a public release. As of now, only handful of developers and few Pixelbook owners have had access to it. However, according to a new leak, Honor has booted the Fuschia OS on its budget gaming smartphone, Honor Play (review).

It seems that the collaboration that brought us the Nexus 6P is working on the development of the new software together. An engineer from Honor seems to have posted a new commit on the Google Open Source Community. According to the new commit, the engineer was able to boot Honor Play into Zircon, which is the kernel for Fuschia operating system. However, apart from this detail the commit doesn’t reveal anything. We can make an intelligent guess from the name of the commit, ‘add support for Kirin 970’, that the company working on making the fledgling OS run on devices based on their last generation flagship SoC.

If this is indeed true, we can expect a number of Huawei and Honor smartphone to be compatible with the upcoming software. The list include smartphones like, Huawei P20 Pro (review) , Huawei Mate RS Porsche Design, Honor View 10 (review), Honor 10 (review), and Huawei Nova 3 (review). among others. The development marks a number of first including the Honor Play being the first consumer Android device to be tested on Fuchsia and Huawei being the first company outside of Google to make a major contribution to the open source project.

While there is not much known about the upcoming software, Google has a demo page live. The page gives us a glimpse into what the upcoming software will look like. Unfortunately, there is not much to see.