From: noemail@none.com
The Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit has been a whirlwind of information this
week, and surprisingly, some of the biggest news has nothing to do with
phones. Just a couple of days after we heard from both Google’s Rick
Osterloh and Qualcomm’s own CEO that the Android and ChromeOS merger was
real, but we were still left with two massive questions: how and when?
Well, in a different product announcements keynote, Google’s head of the
Android Ecosystem, Sameer Samat, just gave us the answer to both, and it’s
“something we’re super excited about for next year.”
If Sameer Samat’s name sounds familiar, it should. He’s the very same
Google
executive who stirred the pot back in July with his statement that ChromeOS
and Android were “combining into a single platform,” a comment he later
had
to clarify. But this time, there was no ambiguity. Speaking on stage at
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, Samat gave us a much clearer statement on the
future of Google’s computing platforms.
Obviously, we want our devices to work seamlessly together. We have
different devices, and you want your AI to work across all of these—that’s
the new area we are driving toward.
If you think about the laptop form factor, we’ve had ChromeOS for a long
time and we’re super committed to that platform and it’s been really
successful for us, we’ve learned a lot from it as well. We also have
Android tablets that have been super successful, they’re becoming more
productivity machines all the time. So I think the opportunity for us that
we see is how do we accelerate all the AI advancement that we’re doing on
Android and bring that to the laptop form factor as rapidly as possible,
and also have the laptop and the rest of the Android ecosystem work
seamlessly together.
So what we’re doing is we’re basically taking the ChromeOS experience
and re-baselining the technology underneath it on Android. So that
combination is something we’re super excited about for next year, and
we’re
working with yourselves [Qualcomm] and others on it, and we can’t wait.
How the Android and ChromeOS merger will actually work
Based on that quote, it sounds like we’ll get the user interface and
experience we know from ChromeOS, but it will all be running on top of a
foundational Android base. Samat explained the reasoning behind this
massive undertaking: to “accelerate all the AI advancement that we’re
doing
on Android and bring that to the laptop form factor as rapidly as possible”
and to make the entire ecosystem “work seamlessly together.”
This isn’t ChromeOS running Android apps in a container anymore. This is one
unified platform, bringing the best of Android’s technology to the laptop
form factor with the ChromeOS user experience on top.
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The hardware is already on the way
And it’s no coincidence that this announcement was made at a Qualcomm event.
We’ve been tracking the development of the first Snapdragon X Plus-powered
Chromebooks for months now, with devices codenamed ‘Quenbi’ and
‘Quartz’
looking to be the first of this new wave of powerful, efficient machines.
These devices would be perfect launch vehicles for this new, merged OS.
Since November 2024, when the merger rumors first started popping up, we’ve
been sharing our thoughts on how this might work and what it will mean for
all of our ChromeOS fans out there. Now we have a timeline and a bit of a
technical roadmap. Needless to say, we’re excited for 2026. It is shaping
up to be the most transformative year for Google’s computing platforms we
have ever seen.
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* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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