Is Android really the next big desktop operating system?

Last month at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, Google executives reiterated their plans to turn Android into a full-fledged desktop operating system, replacing the ChromeOS platform that currently powers Chromebooks. This would theoretically make Android a more direct competitor to Windows, macOS, and desktop Linux, once the transition kicks off in 2026.

Google is hyping up this change as something that "delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC." That sounds great to me, but all the evidence right now points to a different result: a slightly better software experience for Chromebooks, or whatever they are called in the future, and that's it.

The Androidification

When Google revealed the first Chromebook in 2010, the company's limited-edition CR-48 laptop, the platform had a drastically different sales pitch. It was a thin client, with the singular goal of getting you to a Chrome web browser as fast as possible with nothing else in your way.

On these early Chromebooks, solid state storage was mandatory, file management and offline capabilities were limited, and there were no other native applications. ChromeOS didn't even have a windowing system for a while—the browser window was locked in full-screen.

The limited functionality was partly due to ChromeOS being a new platform, but to some extent, it was a deliberate design choice. In a world where most people were using Windows PCs with countless startup and background tasks, slow mechanical hard drives, and the looming threat of malware, a laptop with a cold boot time of around 15 seconds and immediate browser access had some appeal. If you somehow managed to break the underlying system, you would just do a factory reset and log back into your favorite sites and web apps like nothing happened.

This was part of the larger "post-PC era" that also involved the rise of smartphones, the iPad lineup, Android tablets, and other devices. Basically, if you wanted to watch YouTube and get some work done, you had more options than a traditional PC or Mac.

Chromebooks didn't stay that way for long, though. Google clearly wanted them to replace traditional PCs for more people, which required filling in the functionality gaps. They needed video editors, games, messaging services, videoconferencing software, and more robust offline support. Some of these were technically capable of running in a Chrome browser in the mid-2010s, but they weren't there.

Google started porting individual Android apps to Chrome and distributing them through the Chrome Web Store. Eventually, the company built an entire Android virtual machine on top of ChromeOS, giving Chromebooks access to the Google Play Store. This was around the time I used ChromeOS computers as my primary laptops—first a Dell Chromebook, and later a ASUS Chromebook Flip C302. It was not the best experience, as I said on Android Police in 2018:

Perhaps the most pressing issue with Android applications is that most developers don't bother optimizing them for large displays. There was a very brief period when most major Android apps had tablet interfaces — around the launch of Android 3.0 Honeycomb in 2011 — but that time has long since passed. Google is also doing a terrible job of leading by example. With the notable exception of the Gmail app, which does feature a multi-column interface and keyboard shortcuts, most of the company's apps look terrible on Chromebooks — even the Play Store.

Google is leaning more and more on Android apps to make Chromebooks viable computers. While this does lead to Chrome OS being a more versatile operating system, it also means the average user experience isn't getting any better.

The Android app layer in Chrome OS continued to improve over the years, but to this day, most Android apps are designed for a phone-sized vertical touchscreen, not a large-screen computer with a physical keyboard and touchpad. Google later added a Linux container, so you could finally run some desktop-class applications and games on Chromebooks, but those have their own quirks and integration issues.

This brings us to the current state of Chromebooks. They are locked-down computers built around the Chrome web browser—you can install another one through the Play Store or Linux, but Chrome is stuck as the default. Most of your other software is running through an invisible Android virtual machine, or possibly a Linux container. Unlike the original Chromebooks, installing malware is theoretically possible, and a factory reset can mean losing important data if backups are not in place. Your files are split across three virtual file systems that don't have full access to each other. You still can't install the real Adobe Photoshop or Premiere. When the operating system updates end, the laptop effectively becomes a brick.

The replacement of ChromeOS with Android is just the final step in this decade-long Androidification process. The original vision for Chromebooks as lightweight browser-first computers is long gone, and if most of the computer is running through the Android VM already, then cutting out that underlying operating system isn't a massive leap. The full Chrome browser and Linux container just need to move to the Android layer.

The same, but different

I expect the first Android laptops will work almost exactly like today's Chromebooks, with a similar windowing system and the same emphasis on the Google Play Store and Android apps. The unfinished desktop mode hidden in recent Android versions isn't far off from the taskbar and app drawer in ChromeOS. They might even still be called Chromebooks.

The hard part is making something better than ChromeOS, and I don't have much confidence that will happen. Most Android apps and games are still not designed with keyboards, mouse input, and laptop-sized screens in mind. That has been a long-standing problem with the Android ecosystem, and also affects Android tablets and foldables to a lesser extent.

"But Corbin," you might ask, "surely the existence of laptops with Android apps will push developers to better support larger screens!" That will not happen, at least not without new investment from Google and hardware partners. I know that because we're now roughly a decade into the existence of Android apps on Chromebooks, where Google didn't bother fixing its own apps for years. Even the Play Store wasn't optimized properly until 2023.

There are some other important questions without clear answers right now. Will Android be something you can install on traditional PCs? ChromeOS can run on normal PCs right now with ChromeOS Flex, but Android apps aren't supported. Also, will you be able to install another operating system on Android laptops, or will they be locked to a fixed lifecycle like Chromebooks and most Android phones?

I would love to see more competition to Windows and Mac, but I don't think that will come from slightly-different Chromebooks. Prove me wrong, Google.