Indie developers show Fuchsia running in the official Android Studio Emulator [Gallery]

Kyle Bradshaw | May 3 2019 - 11:01 am PT

For the past 5 months, we’ve been watching as Google slowly brought support for their Fuchsia OS to the Android Emulator, which would make the OS accessible to developers who don’t have Pixelbooks. A pair of indie developers have managed to piece together some of Google’s work-in-progress efforts to demonstrate Fuchsia running directly in the Android Emulator.

Fellow Fuchsia enthusiasts Greg Willard and Horus125 took to Willard’s personal blog to share their work. The blog post primarily explains the various steps the duo took to get Fuchsia up and running in the Android Emulator.

Of particular note, four proposed code changes from the Fuchsia Gerrit were needed, dating back to February. Each of these code changes connects an additional piece of the puzzle, like adding a command flag that signals the Fuchsia tools to actually use the Android Emulator.

As these changes have not been merged (or accepted) into Fuchsia code yet, that means they were not part of the Fuchsia “release candidate” we uncovered last month. This casts some serious doubt that we’ll be seeing a public release of Fuchsia for the Android Emulator at Google I/O or any time in the near future.

The two developers also shared screenshots of the results of their work. In them, we get our first glimpse at what appears to be the Ermine shell, a replacement for Fuchsia’s original Armadillo UI.

Clearly, this new UI is far less flashy, which makes sense considering it’s designed for developers, not the average user. Willard notes that there isn’t much else to show off about Fuchsia in its current state.

While it’s possible to follow the duo’s steps and try out Fuchsia for yourself, the guide assumes you already have a decent familiarity with Git, and the other various tools used to manage the Fuchsia source code. Additionally, one of Fuchsia’s requirements for graphics, Vulkan, currently only works in the Android Emulator from Linux, not Mac OS or Windows.