Readit NewsI don't know if this is still the case but the mission was absolutely to replace Android. Many at Google believe Android to be unsalvageable on two fronts: drivers and the general ecosystem.
It has been pitched internally at various products and (AFAIK) only found traction thus far on Nest hubs. It was heavily pushed for Chromecast but I guess nothing came of that.
I'm not an OS expert by any means but I am unconvinced about the viability of a microkernel architecture beyond theory. Security is an often-cited issue with context switching between user and kernel space.
Citation needed
Everyone focuses on tiktok which is kids making stupid videos, but zoom which almost certainly has massive amounts of highly sensitive info going through it, seems to raise very few eye brows comparatively.
It only takes a minute to restore if needed, but the problem is if the OS goes down (which has happened once in the last 10 years due to a disk failure), it takes several hours to reinstall everything from scratch.