We first heard back in November that Google could merge Chrome OS into Android. Now, an executive has publicly confirmed plans for a merger.

Sameer Samat, president of Android ecosystem at Google, asked a TechRadar journalist why they were using an Apple Watch, iPhone, and MacBook:

I asked because we’re going to be combining Chrome OS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they’re getting done.

  • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    11·
    13 hours ago

    Android also is designed to run on lots of different hardware unlike Apple.

    Apple’s OSes are also designed to run on lots of different hardware. Intel, PowerPC, ARM, nVidia, AMD, Apple GPUs. It is just all hardware Apple (mostly these days) designs. There’s no reason to talk about what hardware they run on. We’re talking about their parallel roadmaps to closing off the OS development from users/open-source, and how both are doing the exact same transition, Apple’s is just a quarter century in the making.

    Google has already been doing what is necessary to close Android for years. Example: The AOSP texting app they abandoned years ago. Google Messages is now the messaging app. Fully closed-source. No requirement to ever open it. They also used RCS as an excuse to close off the third-party messaging app arena. No third-party app can use RCS on Android now.

    Play Services, Assistant, Chrome, YouTube, YouTube Music, GBoard, all their applications are being separated and the “old” version phased out. Some things will remain open-source, likely, like the Chromium bits of Chrome, but even that they’ve already forked their secret Chrome sauce.

    With a hybridization of ChromeOS and Android, this will further accelerate Google not having a need to care about the existence of AOSP. Eventually, they’ll just abandon it entirely.

    If you use an AOSP-based OS like Graphene right now, you can see the remnants of the AOSP apps. Peeps on projects like Graphene do some massaging to keep them usable, but they’re basically apps frozen in time to aid companies in proof-of-concepts and not part of what one would call consumer-facing Android today.

    Vendors like Samsung and Lenovo pay to have early access to the Android source, so they’ll still get early access for device development, but it is a 100% pay-to-play model. Likely with NDAs. Which again, is exactly what Apple does.