Video Google has confirmed it will merge its ChromeOS and Android operating systems, and that the mobile OS will emerge triumphant.
The ads and search giant has hinted that the two operating systems would merge. On Wednesday at Qualcomm’s Summit event, Google’s president for the Android ecosystem, Sameer Samat, made it official. Android will be the winner and users will see the results in 2026.
“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?” he said on Wednesday.
“Basically, we’re taking the Chrome OS experience, and we’re re-baselining the technology underneath it on Android, so that combination is something we’re super excited about for next year.”
Chromebooks have helped Google to carve a niche in the laptop market, mostly with low-cost devices sold to schools for use by students. The search behemoth also created expensive and powerful Chromebooks.
But with Google – along with everyone else in tech sphere – adding AI to everything, it’s Android’s time to shine, he said.
Moving to the Android code base will mean Google can deploy its Gemini AI services on more devices, Samat said.
To buttress his argument that Android can work on laptops, Samat pointed to the OS being “super successful” on tablet computers.
Qualcomm’s role in Google’s new strategy appears to be adapting its smartphone SoCs for laptops, or ensuring the laptop chips it makes to run Windows can also handle Android.
Samat said that Android also offered opportunities for adding XR (virtual, augmented and other extended-reality systems) to be built into a wide variety of platforms. Android would enable this, he argued.
But Samat said merging Google’s two OSes is mostly about AI. Like everything else this year. ®