This week, the Fuchsia team shared a new proposal titled “ADB on Fuchsia” that shares the team’s intention to support ADB for controlling devices and the reasoning behind wanting to do so.
At present, the core “fx” and “ffx” tools used to control Fuchsia devices are only compatible with Linux and macOS computers. And while there’s an effort to get ffx running on Windows, that’s not projected to be completed until the end of 2022.
Sadly, ADB for Fuchsia won’t work for consumer Fuchsia devices, such as the Nest Hubs, since Goolgle states that it will only be available during early development phases of Fuchsia devices.
Is ADB for Fuchsia considered a good thing for consumers, a bad thing, or just a thing?
I’ve used ADB to install alternative Android operating systems on quite a few phones, but never really anything I’d consider past “script kiddie” level of knowledge…
It’s just a tool, I use it to get console access to a phone that’s otherwise very difficult to use on a phone itself.
I’ll be EXTREMELY disappointed if google really intends to restrict/deny owners access to their own Fuchsia devices. My judgement and support of Fuchsia will be heavy swayed by just how hostile owner restrictions will be on typical Fuchsia devices. I’ve been holding an open mind about it thus far, but google isn’t going to get many chances to make a first impression so they better not screw around too much with user hostilities in the opening days. Otherwise there are many of us who will swear off Fuchsia altogether. BS excuses are a very fast way to turn off your power user audience!
Alfman,
Not sure blocking people’s devices is a good idea. I still give them benefit of the doubt, since this is still too early in the Fuchsia development. But I agree it is not a good sign.
Personally, I would be okay if it was a Microsoft style “pay a one time fee, and unlock dev mode” on devices. But others might have different preferences.
sukru,
I kind of feel like that’s a tax on openness, which discourages openness, unsurprisingly. But I concede it’s better than the “we control what you do on your devices and you have no choice” approach.
It allows to do some stuff that otherwise would require rooting. Right now I can think of 2 examples:
*Touch emulation, useful to map screen controls to physical controls like a gamepad or a keyboard. Although there are applications that don’t require that I think they have worse latency.
*Full application backups: Helium.