With the recent announcement that Andy Rubin was stepping down as head of the Android Team and that the head of the Chrome team – Sundar Pichai – had now been handed the reigns of the Android team in addition to his role as head of the ChromeOS team, there has been much speculation regarding a merge of the two operating systems.
Speaking at Google’s Big Tent event in India, Google chairman Eric Schmidt participated in a Q and A session where he addressed this issue directly. Schmidt advised that Chrome and Android will not be going the way of Google Reader, the two would remain separate but in the future there would be more commonality between the two operating systems.
There has been speculation previously from Schmidt himself with regards to the fate of Chrome and Android; back in 2011 he advised that eventually the two would merge. This statement represents a small back track but given the changing goals of a large company such as Google this could be a recent decision. Given Google’s history with secrecy, it could also be a bluff and perhaps we could see something come about at Google IO.
What do you think? Will Chrome and Android remain separate or is this a bluff?
Mattias Duarte (spelling) used to work for WebOS right? Which was essentially a phone operating system that was built on the building blocks of a browser iirc…
So now the top guys in Android are from WebOS and Chrome OS background – it is starting to look just a little like Google is up to something!!!