Is it really happening? Will the fabled merging of Android and ChromeOS really be coming? If a report by Android Police is correct then we might be seeing our first glimpse of it at Google’s October 5th event (4th in the States). Depending on how you read it, the latest tweet from Hiroshi Lockheimer, the man in charge of all things Android and Chrome at Google, it definitely could be telegraphing such a move:
We announced the 1st version of Android 8 years ago today. I have a feeling 8 years from now we'll be talking about Oct 4, 2016.
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) September 24, 2016
The gravity of Hiroshi’s comment is immense, he is comparing an announcement at their October event with the official birth of Android itself. Surely no mere hardware, which will be obsolete well and truly in 8 years, would fit that bill? There’s a couple of ways of looking at it… either Google’s Pixel phones will be remembered in the same way as the advent of the iPhone, or more likely, Google has something much bigger to talk about.
Enter Andromeda, which is apparently Google’s codename for the current efforts to merge Android and ChromeOS. What does this mean? Are we getting a new OS entirely? Will ChromeOS or Android be going away? Do we have to say goodbye to our little green robot friend?
It’s a little too early for any of that. At present what we have is a tweet that hints at a major announcement of some sort. We have reports of an ongoing project to merge the two OSs and we’ve got a project name for something we all assumed was going on.
In all likelihood, a Chrome/Android hybrid is going to target the laptop/high-end tablet market rather than mobiles, but we’re already seeing elements of Chrome sneaking into Android too (with seamless over-the-air updates now a feature in Android Nougat). We don’t know exactly what Google has going on, but with just over a week until the event, we don’t have long to wait.
What do you think Hiroshi’s tweet was hinting at? Let us know below.
Maybe there is a reason they are rumoured to change the name from Nexus. Maybe these are going to be more than phones. If it turns out I can plug a USB dock into these and find I can get multiple screens, a keyboard and mouse and use chromeOS and my Android components at the same time…
It would be crazy if the HTC devices were Nexus after all and these Pixel phones are something completely different. Crazy good.
I don’t think the reason is because they are more than phones; more that this represents just one more step of google on it’s journey to the dark side. You don’t put an ex-Morgan Stanley bankster in as hatchetwoman by mistake, they want to be apple and have apple’s money from hardware. At the same time, you are right that ‘more than phones’ is possible. The raw processing power of an 820 based phone is at least up with a Pentium processor of 10 years ago, and more than enough to do typical tasks like word processing, spreadsheets, etc. The… Read more »
It means Google is announcing their phone OS / Pixel Phones which is just Android with their skin. It’s really nothing to do with laptops. Apps on Chrome OS are already out on a handful of laptops.
In 8 years well be talking about the day Google ‘officially’ entered the smartphone market.
From my understanding, Chrome OS is just a Chrome browser, isn’t it?
It’s grown into much more than that…
It’s a full-blown Linux based operating system…
As I understand it, the way they are running android apps in ChromeOS is similar to the way docker works. Each app is in a container, with a common android OS layer shared across them, all the way down to a HAL. That makes for an easy route to merging ChromeOS and Android – you put ChromeOS as a ‘virtualisation’ manager above android and it’s apps, with those apps turning up as windows. An added advantage would be the container with the android OS could easily be updated to new OS. Provided the HAL really does it’s job, and with… Read more »
Hmm! I’d like to think it’ll be something epic, but I also tend to think he might be exaggerating a little…
Still, that tweet combined with all the new outdoor advertising… maybe we’re in for something bigger than just the devices!