All you need to get the offline experience with an App in this situation is having an Install button that prevents cache eviction.
It also mentions P2P retrieval, which would further avoid using an expensive data connection.
It sounds like with Fuchsia any predicability goes out the window. I could do a task one day that is fine, the next day it causes issue. My question is, does the user get any predicability and control? Eg: you mention an "install" button - will there be one? The article doesn't mention that. In fact, it's the reverse: "The most important thing though, is that these processes will be completely transparent."
(Admittedly knowledge of this kind of thing does require some technical skill on the part of the user. Maybe Google have decided to remove that to make a more user friendly experience. That might be a good choice to make, but seems worth commenting on at least.)
1) Are they going to ask the same permissions every time an instant app is downloaded or are they caching the answers of the user?
2) How do they pick the instant app to download when multiple apps can do the same thing?
3) As a consequence, how to know which company to contact for assistance and/or ask for our personal data (think GDPR)?
It can probably be assumed that you would be able to set a preference for one module over another, but I haven't found any proof of that yet.
This is my knee-jerk reaction and I admit I'm looking ahead as Fuchsia evolves further. Trying to see the benefits of this in the long-term but currently failing. Is this another nail in the coffin to conventional desktop OSes as we possibly evolve (or de-evolve) in the decades to come?
I sometimes imagine what systems like those in 'Star Trek', '2001 - A Space Odyssey' (HAL) and others might look/feel like. Is Fuschia an attempt to get us there (cynical flipside: albeit with authority figures bent on reestablishing control of a narrative they have lost over the last few years).
How much control do we give up and... can we trust the gatekeepers?
(the one where Barclay gets zapped with the brain light)
On Star Trek though the computer runs on free energy and is just a tool. Google has to make money.
Right. As I think ahead, though, the only tools we're essentially getting are from commercial companies. Even our own governments (worldwide) are running these tools from the same commercial sources.
I'm not aware of any solutions being built now for the kind of interconnected future (smart homes, smart cars, smart "news", etc) that isn't centralized and also coming from commercial sources (Google, Amazon, etal).
The Star Trek/2001 analogy is about an OS system that isn't too dissimilar to our own connected future. Instead of handling a Star Ship, these systems would be running smart homes, managing our lives. That's a lot of profiling in the hands of a few companies (and their "partners") who may not have the best intentions.
For example, WebGL based games still don't run properly on devices that barely sweat with OpenGL 3.x native apps.
I'm getting a bit apprehensive about the feed centric view though. What are the odds Google is going to require full browsing/identity/use/location/voice/video/file permissions for everything, by mixing it all together into one 'experience', like they do with the Google assistant
I suppose at least it's open source
I'm also wary of the feed thing to. As well as the data access thing you mention, how does it decide what the "best" app for a task is and do I get any say? Also, I wonder if it will end up with a situation that if you want your content to be available to these users you have to make it available with no control over how it's presented? (You could argue that on the web currently most content producers have messed that up with trackers, ads, etc which is a fair point but I don't know if this is the answer.) If so, whether it's Open Source or not makes little difference to most people trying to publish stuff.
(except worse because it's a walled garden)
