ChromeOS will use Android’s kernel and framework to bring more Google AI to your Chromebook

For at least the last decade, Google has been a loosely confederated amalgamation of different projects and initiatives. Most of those projects that don’t fail on their own merits are quietly put down by Google for not being as popular as Gmail or Docs. As for the projects that do survive, they often exist within their own partitioned world with only the faintest whispers of communication passing between them. But those walls between Google’s many services and products are starting to come down, and the first one to crumble may be between the Chromebook and Android.

It’s all about AI

In a post on the Chromium blog, Prajakta Gudadhe and Alexander Kuscher, directors of Engineering and Product Management for ChromeOS, give a tantalizing outline of the Chromebook’s Android-infused future. The plan is to incorporate parts of the Android ecosystem into Chromebooks going forward so that Google’s AI features can come to the platform faster than they otherwise would have. Specifically, the ChromeOS team says it is going to incorporate the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks into ChromeOS.

There’s no way to know for sure what this will look like going forward, but since both operating systems will be based on the same kernel, we can probably expect to see a convergence between ChromeOS and Android in the not-too-distant future (similar to Ubuntu and Debian). Gudadhe and Kuscher say that “improvements in the tech stack are starting now but won’t be ready for consumers for quite some time.” That’s not an especially clear statement, but it sounds like these changes will be quietly implemented into Chrome OS, but that it won’t affect how the operating system looks or behaves. For now.

This is almost certainly part of Google’s Senior Vice President of Devices & Services, Rick Osterloh, taking charge of the new Platforms and Devices team, which is in charge of Pixel, ChromeOS, and Android, among other things. Osterloh’s goal in taking charge of these once-disparate teams is to accelerate the pace of AI innovation and adoption on Google’s most important platforms, and that seems to be exactly what’s happening with this new integration.

Related

ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Which gives the better answers?

Gemini is bringing ChatGPT some much needed competition

As tantalizing as the fruits of these labors may be, it does signal the dismantling of another wall that Google has long maintained: the one separating Android (the open-source OS of choice for over three billion smartphones) from the rest of Google. When questioned by The Verge whether the wall between Pixel and Android was crumbling, Osterloh was adamant that Android would remain distinct from Google’s hardware. But he didn’t say anything about software, and I’d wager that we’re witnessing the beginning of Android’s Borg moment.