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UPDATE: Google saved a little more news about this upcoming fusion of Android and ChromeOS for its spot in the closing minutes of a new-products keynote on day two of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit.
Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm’s group general for mobile, compute and XR, invited Sameer Sawat, Google’s Android-ecosystem president, to talk about Google’s ambitions for AI. But after some banter about AI assistance on phones, watches and smart glasses, he pivoted the conversation: “Let’s switch contexts and talk about productivity on a large-screen compute environment.”
Saying “we all want our devices to work seamlessly together,” Sawat implied that while Google remains “super committed” to ChromeOS, its large-screen operating system was trailing on that front.
“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?” he said. “And also have the laptop and the rest of the Android ecosystem work seamlessly together.”
The answer will be to put ChromeOS on an Android-derived foundation, Sawat explained.
“We’re basically taking the ChromeOS experience, and we’re re-baselining the technology underneath it on Android,” he said. “That combination is something we’re super excited about for next year.”
Original Story (9/24):
The teasers continue from Google around plans to bring Android to PCs.
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During an onstage conversation with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon at its Snapdragon Summit this week, Google’s SVP of Devices and Services, Rick Osterloh, said, “In the past, we’ve always had very different systems between what we’re building on PCs and what we’re building on smartphones. We’ve embarked on a project to combine that.
“We are building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems,” he added. “This is another way we can leverage all of the great work we’re doing together on our AI stack, our full stack, bringing Gemini models, bringing the assistant, bringing all of our applications and developer community into the PC domain.
“I think this is another way in which Android is going to be able to serve everyone in every computing category.”
Amon added that he’s “seen it, it is incredible. It delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC. I cannot wait to have one.”
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Osterloh didn’t confirm how Google will market these changes. This comes a couple of months after Google’s Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem, told TechRadar it planned to combine “ChromeOS and Android into a single platform.”
Soon after that interview went live, Samat said on social media, “We’re building the ChromeOS experience on top of Android underlying technology to unlock new levels of performance, iterate faster, & make your laptop + phone work better together.” He clarified this was all shared in a blog post back in 2024.
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This may have been Samat’s way of suggesting ChromeOS branding will remain, even though the technologies will be more similar than ever.
For now, Osterloh’s teasing of Android’s future on computing hardware may suggest we’ll hear Google’s full plans sooner rather than later.
Rob Pegoraro contributed to this report from Hawaii; Qualcomm covered his airfare and lodging.
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