Alphabet Inc.’s Google plans to fold its Chrome operating system for personal computers into its Android mobile-operating system, according to people familiar with the matter, a sign of the growing dominance of mobile computing.
Google engineers have been working for roughly two years to combine the operating systems and have made progress recently, two of the people said. The company plans to unveil its new, single operating system in 2017, but expects to show off an early version next year, one of the people said.
The writing’s been on the wall for a while now, and to be honest, this makes perfect sense. Android is the more popular and more capable of the two, and already runs Chrome as it is.
I hope we won’t be getting the Android “experience” with it. CrOS devices are supported for longer than 1.5years.
I just love playing with Android tablet and super laggy Chrome browser. /s
We don’t need Android expanding to desktop. They could fold Android into glibc Linux instead. But it sounds like they are pulling all this bionic and related userspace to desktop. Welcome to the glorious future of Android only drivers for your PC…
Edited 2015-10-29 22:49 UTC
It is an utopia to expect OEMs would play nice with GNU/Linux for mainstream computing.
The first wave before Android (netbooks with customized distros) was already a sign of things to come.
Why is that exactly? Valve seems to be OK with it. There is nothing inherently better in Android – in fact it’s inferior in many ways. I never understood why Google couldn’t reshape Android into regular glibc based Linux after they bought it, and instead kept that deep rift it was causing.
Edited 2015-10-30 02:00 UTC
So far Valve SteamMachines is a commercial failure. Maybe it will change in the future.
It is very easy to understand for anyone that has worked in with the enterprise and sales teams, product differentiation.
Just look at the customization that are applied to any licensed product, be it software or hardware.
Without differentiation, any brand becomes a plain re-reseller.
Basic businesses rules.
How exactly Android (bionic Linux) is better at differentiation than glibc Linux? It has nothing to do with this issue.
Edited 2015-10-30 07:07 UTC
Each OEM wants to have the freedom to customize the whole stack, never release anything back to the community and profit from their work.
The glibc license prevents that.
Edited 2015-10-30 08:09 UTC
There is little benefit in customizing the C library and if they break compatibility much less. Unless they write a printf() function 100 times faster.
Try to explain that to layer and judges.
That’s with anything before it’s released. It doesn’t mean it’s a failure – that’s nonsense. Failure or success can be measured only after it’s released.
They have publicly stated why many times.
Legal Reasons:
glibc licensing is confusing as hell and not even the lawyers can make sense of it. It is stated by the FSF to be LGPL 2 or later, but some files specifically state they are GPL, some even state they are GPL 3 or later.
http://www.palamida.com/posts/view/19/What_is_the_license_of_the_GN…
Even if the licensing was made unambiguous eventually, it is still a FSF project – odds are any effort to clean up the licensing would likely result in an LGPL 3 or higher clause, since that is what the FSF would likely want…
The linux kernel, on the other hand is GPL 2, period, with public and loud proclamations that it will stay that way indefinitely. It is a known quantity and the legal challenges of dealing with it are well explored.
Google explicitly wanted to isolated Android apps from the GPL/LGPL (especially v3) as much as humanly possible. Bionic does that by being BSD licensed. glibc would make everyone nervous as hell.
Technical Reasons
Some types of binaries on Android require static linking to bionic. The glibc license would by definition bleed into these as static linking is explicitly restricting in the LGPL.
Bionic is much smaller, uses less memory, does not contain the overhead of supporting other kernels (it is linux only), and has optimizations for low clock speed devices.
ps. I’m not in any way trying to disparage the GPL, Im just stating the facts…
As long as ASOP remains strong I have no problem with this. We’ll have Android distros branched off the core project like we have Red Hat/Debian/Ubuntu-based distros now. Having the whole core system above the kernel developed together is probably smarter anyway.
It’s a mess because closed blobs depend on libc, which means we’ll have Android only drivers and Android only devices (except for ones with open drivers). Plus they use different graphics stack (Surface Flinger) which doesn’t help improving Wayland and Linux desktop. I.e. it’s a completely separate beast.
That’s exactly what I’m saying, and Android isn’t helping it – it only makes things worse by causing a major rift.
Edited 2015-10-30 01:57 UTC
I’m planning on getting a Chromebook and this has me a little worried. It depends what they’re going to do. Generally I don’t think it’s a good idea to combine the two; I think Chrome OS is a better base for a computing system (tablets, laptops or desktops. It’s even being used on servers [Core OS] and routers [OnHub]). I think it’s a better interface too. Chromebooks are doing very well in U.S. schools and in some companies (Netflix uses Chreombooks), merging with Android might be throwing away the advantages of Chromebooks (security, speed and low cost of maintenance).
I do think it would be a good idea to combine the “apps” side of things. Android apps already run on Chrome OS but they could do more to integrate the two, like including the Google Play app store. It could work on Windows and Mac too through the Chrome browser. It’d be a great way to have universal apps; and the app developer can decide if an app needs/recommends touch, keyboard, mouse or gamepad…
Edited 2015-10-29 23:31 UTC
It sounds more to me that google is actually seeing a future in the smart phone/computer side of things. Motorola was awesome with the splashtop, then of course Microsoft continuum (if it works like promised). Its going to be hard with any stupid limitations from mobile websites (hulu) that like to shoot you down with a mobile or restricted version because you’re on a phone.
My chromebook was the single most useless technology purchase I ever made. Well ok, the EeePC 701 was a close second, but at least on there I had a fully functional desktop.
Android with a different skin makes way more sense. At least you’ll have apps.
Have you tried installing a full Linux or BSD distro on it? The hardware was designed with Linux in mind, so it should be a no-brainer. In the past I’d considered a Chromebook for that reason alone (cheap, guaranteed Linux compatible hardware).
Well at least when I new Android version comes out I’ll be able to try it on my PC instead of having to purchase a new phone to check it out.
So it will be something similar to this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLWJcnE7ywc
I don’t understand why something like android couldn’t run in a VM under chromeos. The whole android ecosystem, especially the driver and hardware side stinks to high heaven. Android sucks less than what apple and MS had to offer on the mobile side. chromeos is a little gem, except for the printer/scanner support stuff (android isn’t much better for that).
Or a container.
Have it run in its own process and file space on the same kernel as chromeos. Have an IPC mechanism between the worlds to do display, app launching etc and you’re done. Heck you could do multiple distinct Android profiles this way easily, with native performance.
My old laptop went away when I switched jobs. I decided that I am not going to run MacOS anymore.
So I decided to run some form of linux. The only laptop out there that is reasonable in cost and is comparable to a Macbook is the Pixel 1 and 2. So I dropped my $$ on the pixel ls and love it.
My original intention was to delete the chromeos and run mint or ubuntu on it. I ended up liking chromeos and using crouton to run linux. The system works well.
Android sucks. Yes it has pretty apps, but I want my laptop to be a laptop. I was under the impression that Chromos was going to add the ability to eventually run all android apps. That is a cool idea.
Here is another thing, in my experience android drops old hardware fairly fast. This forces one to either go buy something else, or installs one of the roms. While there are some decent ones, I really doubt that there will be one dedicated for laptop users.
Well I guess in the worse case, I will keep with what I got until it gets dropped. If the hardware is still in good shape, it will make a good linux machine until it dies.
What sucks is that the Pixel is the best linux machine out there. Every other laptop I looked at had some kind of compromise when running linux. The only compromise I have with the pixel is the 64 gig ssd. that is easily overcome with a 128gig sd card.