Google has been developing a new operating system, Fuchsia, for all kinds of devices and until now they've been exclusively in charge of testing. In a surprise reveal, Huawei announced that it will use the Honor Play as a testbed for Fuchsia, with that phone being the first mainstream device to do so. Huawei made the Nexus 6P, arguably the best Nexus device in the series, so they already have a solid history with Google. Notwithstanding recent politics that effectively banned Huawei devices in the US, this seems like a good partnership.
Huawei has posted several public commits to Fuchsia’s Gerrit source code management in the last year, but nothing significant enough to point to any major work. In a new commit, however, a Huawei engineer said that devices with the Kirin 970 processor will be compatible with Fuchsia and the Honor Play will be the first testbed. The engineer was able to boot the device into Zircon, Fuchsia’s kernel, but that's all the specifics we have. The OS is most likely incomplete on the Honor Play at this point.
Although the Honor Play (Huawei's gaming phone) is the first guinea pig, a large handful of Huawei phones have the Kirin 970, meaning the devices below could also run Google's new OS.
Huawei Mate 10
Huawei Mate 10 Pro
Huawei Mate 10 Porsche Design
Huawei P20
Huawei P20 Pro
Huawei Mate RS Porsche Design
Honor V10 (Honor View 10)
Honor 10
Huawei Nova 3
Honor Note 10
As mentioned before, none of these phones will make it to the US in the foreseeable future, but it's exciting to see both companies advance a new OS.
Source: 9to5Google
