Samsung is now a contributor to Google’s Fuchsia OS

Kyle Bradshaw | May 12 2021 - 11:26 am PT

For years now, Google has been steadily developing Fuchsia OS, exploring the potential benefits of building an operating system from the ground up. Now it seems that Samsung has begun contributing some of its work to Google’s Fuchsia OS project.

Back in December, Google opened the doors to developers of all varieties to contribute to the Fuchsia project, marking the project’s first steps into the limelight. Even before then, companies have worked with Fuchsia before or contributed to the project, with companies like Huawei at one point working on support for one of its own devices in the OS.

The latest company to contribute to Google’s Fuchsia project is Samsung, with the addition of code related to Samsung’s “Flash-Friendly File System.” Better known as “F2FS,” the project is an alternative system for managing the files on a storage device, such as the built-in storage of a smartphone.

In recent years, F2FS has become a serious competitor to EXT4, which has long been the de facto file system for Android devices. You can find F2FS being used in Samsung’s phones since the Galaxy Note 10, Google phones since the Pixel 3, and many more Android devices. Considering Fuchsia has its own separate ideas of how file systems should work, it seems the new support for Samsung’s F2FS may be intended more for the ability to read data from other devices, rather than using F2FS on its own.

More importantly, this isn’t a lone Samsung employee contributing work to Fuchsia in their own name. Instead, in the official “AUTHORS” file, “Samsung Inc.” is listed side by side with “Google LLC,” seemingly formalizing the two companies’ collaboration, at least on this particular effort. Looking ahead, Google and Samsung will be continuing to work on F2FS support for Fuchsia, with “major releases” planned out through July.

It’s unclear if Samsung has any further intentions for Fuchsia OS or if its contributions will be limited to just F2FS. Thus far, there have been no indications of whether or not Samsung intends to ever include Fuchsia OS on a future device.

Google declined to comment on this story.