Android Authority: ‘Google Is Transforming ChromeOS Into Android’

Mishaal Rahman, reporting for Android Authority:

While both Android and ChromeOS have seen huge success in different markets, they’ve struggled to compete in one product category where they overlap: tablets. The high-end tablet market is dominated by the Apple iPad, and no matter what Google has tried, it has failed to change that. However, a source tells Android Authority that Google is working on a multi-year project to fully turn ChromeOS into Android, and the end result could be a platform that finally bests the iPad.

Probably not. Frankly it’s kind of weird that Android is a peer to iOS when it comes to phones, but not at all when it comes to tablets, even though iPadOS remains just a big-screen version of iOS. There are zillions of tablets out there that run Android, but they’re all crap and everyone knows it. “Flagship Android phones” are a thing; “Flagship Android tablets” are not. And iPads are a huge business for Apple, and the iPad is now solidly established as a piece of our cultural firmament. Everyone knows what an iPad is.

To better compete with the iPad as well as manage engineering resources more effectively, Google wants to unify its operating system efforts. Instead of merging Android and Chrome OS into a new operating system like rumors suggested in the past, however, a source told me that Google is instead working on fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android. While we don’t know what this means for the ChromeOS or Chromebook brands, we did hear that Google wants future “Chromebooks” to ship with the Android OS in the future. That’s why I believe that Google’s rumored new Pixel Laptop will run a new version of desktop Android as opposed to the ChromeOS that you’re likely familiar with.

So they’re not “merging” the two OSes as rumored, many times, in the past, but they’re “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android”. The only way that really makes a lick of sense is that they’re shitcanning ChromeOS and working to make Android not suck on devices other than phones, like laptops and tablets. Good luck with that, given that even Apple has struggled to make iOS/iPadOS a good laptop OS. OS platforms are just hard — hard to design, hard to engineer, hard to evolve. And Apple, for one, seems more committed than ever to the idea that MacOS and iPadOS remain very different platforms.

And, somehow, there’s no mention of Fuchsia in Rahman’s piece. Fuchsia is supposedly Google’s OS of the future, but which more and more is smelling like Google’s Copland or Pink — a sprawling “next-gen” OS project that collapses under the weight of its own ambition and lack of practical focus, spinning its wheels for years “in development” whilst the world moves on.

★ Tuesday, 19 November 2024