Google is experimenting with running Chrome OS on Android

Although Google initially designed the Android operating system around smartphones, it has since updated it to work on other form factors such as tablets, watches, TVs and car dashboards . However, to compete in the PC market, Google created Chrome OS instead of just using Android. Over the years, Google has made the two operating systems more synergistic. For example, Chrome OS comes with a copy of the Android runtime so Chromebooks can run Android apps. The reverse (Android devices running Chrome OS software) is not possible at the moment, but this may change in the future as Google tests a method to run Chrome OS on Android devices.

It’s no secret that many modern Android devices have enough storage, memory, and raw processing power to handle all the computing tasks the average person would throw at them. Because it already has Chrome OS, Google never felt obligated to make Android more like Windows or macOS. That doesn’t mean he didn’t try. In fact, there was a time when Google was actively working on creating a hybrid between Android and Chrome OS – named Andromeda – which it ultimately abandoned. The reason Google abandoned its plan to merge Android and Chrome OS was that both platforms were already successful. So it would be more productive for the company to focus on improving each platform.

“For us, there’s no point in merging (Chrome OS and Android),” Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s vice president of Android, Chrome OS and Play, said in late 2016 during an episode of the show (now extinct) Everything about Android podcast. He added: “They are both successful. We just want to make sure both sides benefit from each other. » This is why Android borrowed seamless updates from Chrome OS and why Chrome OS added support for Android apps. “You’ll see a lot more things like this happening, where we’re kind of cross-pollinating,” Lockheimer said later in the podcast. “But not, sort of, a merger.”

True to its word, there is no evidence today that Google plans to merge the two platforms. However, thanks to a relatively new feature of the Android platform, Google now has the ability to run Chrome OS with Android seamlessly. This is made possible by Android Virtualization Framework (AVF), a feature introduced in Android 13 that provides a secure and private execution environment for highly sensitive code.

Even though AVF was originally designed to run small workloads in a very lightweight version of Android loaded in an isolated virtual machine, there is technically no reason why it couldn’t be used to run other operating systems. In fact, this was already demonstrated when developer Danny Lin got Windows 11 running on an Android phone in 2022. Google itself has never officially provided support for running anything other than its custom version of Android called ” microdroid” in AVF, but this is no longer the case. The company has started offering official support for running Chromium OS, the open source version of Chrome OS, on Android phones through AVF, and has even privately demoed it to other companies.

At a private event, Google recently showed off a special version of Chromium OS – codenamed “ferrochrome” – running in a virtual machine on a Pixel 8. However, Chromium OS was not shown running on the display of the phone itself. Instead, it was projected onto an external display, which is possible because Google recently enabled display output on its Pixel 8 series. Time will tell if Google plans to position Chrome OS as a platform for its office mode ambitions and its rival Samsung DeX.

Unfortunately, Google didn’t reveal at the event whether it plans to ship a version of Chromium or Chrome OS to existing or future devices. The company simply demonstrated that it is now possible to run Chrome OS with Android and gave smartphone makers the tools to do so. It’s possible that Google was simply using the Pixel 8 as a testbed with no plans to offer Chrome OS on any of its own devices, but we really hope that’s not the case. Virtualization is already an incredibly popular mechanism for running software designed for another platform on existing hardware, and many flagship phones have enough power, space, and memory to run Chrome OS alongside Android . Hopefully, Google will offer the ability to run Chrome OS alongside Android on a future device, because the revamped desktop mode experience we saw in a recent Android 15 beta seems far from ready.