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Report: Google To Fold Chrome OS Into Android (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report at the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) Google plans to merge its Chrome operating system into Android. Google engineers have already been working on this transition for two years; the company expects to have a functioning preview next year, and a finished product in 2017. "The move is also an attempt by Google to get Android running on as many devices as possible to reach as many people as possible. The operating system runs phones, tablets, watches, TVs and car infotainment systems. Adding laptops could increase Android's user base considerably. That should help Google woo more outside developers who want to write apps once and have them work on as many gadgets as possible, with little modification." This doesn't mean Chrome OS is on its way out. According to public statements from Google execs, it will continue to exist and see active development.
Isn't this one of those things where they make a product with an emphasis on security, and then as it gains some popularity, people want more features, more functionality, and so they start adding those features and functionality, and then they just start turning it more and more into Android, and then the security holes and malware problems with Android start to appear in Chrome OS, and then the advantages that Chrome OS had vanish? Isn't it one of those things? Is it really impossible to just have two different platforms with emphasis on different strengths? I think the marketing people are doing this. I blame them.
That makes little sense though. That'd mean two competing, incompatible, lines of laptops. And folding ChromeOS into Android should be relatively easy, given the common kernel - it's already been done with Ubuntu and Android, and I believe Motorola shipped a phone at one point with some GNU/Linux distribution running with Android, where Android was the core UI on the phone, but plugging it into a laptop cradle gave you a proper GNOME-ish desktop with your apps available in both places.
I wonder what's really going on? Quite simply: I don't believe the article if it's implying two lines of laptop, but I don't know what's going on at Google and while I can make intelligent guesses as to the future of Android and ChromeOS, I can't say for definite what direction they'd want to take both operating systems in.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The app ecosystem's the thing, and while many can survive with Google Docs, some of us need offline tools. If this spurs a proper overhaul of LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice to a lightweight, Android-friendly version, we could be on the cusp of something very interesting indeed.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Google shouldn't have bothered with ChromeOS in the first place. It just confused everyone that they shipped two mutually incompatible operating systems that overlapped over the same problem space.
It's not clear to me that this needs to create a big practical difference for you. I guess I don't really know what's been going on with ChromeOS lately, but my understanding is that both Android and ChromeOS are basically Linux, so merging the system codebase itself doesn't need to make a big difference for users. They could even potentially use the same display system across both platforms while customizing the UI to fit each. ChromeOS could still be, essentially, a simplified Linux distro where the UI is mostly just just Chrome browser.
On the other hand, it would possibly make it easier for Google to update/maintain both systems if they shared a codebase. It would also possibly make it easier for Android developers to create desktop versions of their phone apps, in cases where that made sense.
So all in all, it seems like this is probably a good thing. Not that they couldn't screw it up.
ChromeOS is very fast right now because it is so lightweight. So the advantage is that you can get reasonable speeds out of cheaper hardware. At least that's one advantage.