Google’s Android president has confirmed the platform is set to replace ChromeOS – but not when.
The ostensible reason is, we suspect, to offer better integration with Android handsets and smartwatches and so on, to rival Apple levels of interop.
Sameer Samat is Mountain View’s “President, Android Ecosystem,” so presumably he knows. TechRadar’s interview is otherwise a little scant on detail, but it may not be all that long before the change happens. This year’s Google IO conference was, you may not be surprised to find, full of hype about AI, but the ChromeOS community on Reddit noticed there was almost no mention of the Chromebook operating system.
As we observed in 2023, ChromeOS is a successful platform, outselling Macs, and The Reg FOSS desk agrees with our own SJVN’s 2022 take: ChromeOS is a Linux desktop. PC sales are doing fairly well, thanks in part to the looming “End of 10,” and analyst CMI reckons sales are growing. Last year, Google still recommended it as a lifeline for Windows 10 users.
Under the open source Aura shell, ChromeOS is considerably more like a standard Linux distro than Android. It uses glibc and Canonical’s upstart init system, and while the 2009 prototype was based on Ubuntu, it switched to a Gentoo basis in 2010. On branded ChromeOS hardware, it can run Android apps installed from the Play Store. ChromeOS Flex, which runs on ordinary PC and Intel Mac hardware, doesn’t have that – but both editions have the Crostini Linux environment built in, which uses Canonical’s LXD to let you install and run Debian apps inside transparent VMs.
Android differs significantly as an OS. It still runs on a Linux kernel, but uses the Bionic libc, which is BSD-licensed and based on BSD code rather than Linux. It’s still a Linux, though, and it’s open source via the official Google AOSP.
There have been desktop PC versions of Android for years. Some, such as Android-x86 and BlissOS-x86, are still maintained. There are others, such as Indian budget laptop vendor Primebook’s PrimeOS. Some have gone dormant, for example Jide’s Remix OS, which The Register tried in 2016, but the company changed direction.
It’s certainly doable. And improved integration with Android handsets and smartwatches might interest some users… as well as Google.
The big problem is driver support. ChromeOS Flex shows that this is surmountable, although there are still issues, such as Nvidia GPU support (third-party efforts do exist). The Linux app infrastructure is in a VM anyway, and there’s already an Android equivalent. We reckon this might happen sooner rather than later – and that the visible differences could be minimal. Assuming there’s a Flex equivalent, even if maybe not at first, this could mean more app choice too. ®
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