TapTechNews May 14 news, although Android was originally designed around smartphones, through a series of upgrades and adaptations, it has been able to be used in more devices such as tablets, watches, TVs, and car cabins. However, in order to better compete in the PC market with Microsoft, Google did not use the Android system, but instead re-created ChromeOS.
Over the years, Google has made a lot of efforts to make these two operating systems work better together. For example, Chromebook comes with an Android runtime environment, allowing it to run Android apps, but not vice versa.
However, Google has recently begun testing a method to run ChromeOS on Android devices, and has shown its OEM partners how to run ChromiumOS (the open-source version of ChromeOS) on Android phones.
Of course, there is currently no evidence that Google plans to merge these two platforms. However, Google had previously been actively working on a hybrid architecture of Android and ChromeOS (codenamed Andromeda), but eventually abandoned the plan.
Google Vice President Hiroshi Lockheimer, responsible for Android, ChromeOS, and Play business, said at the end of 2016, “For us, merging [ChromeOS and Android] makes no sense,” “They have both been successful. We just want to ensure that both can benefit from each other.” That's why Android adopted ChromeOS's seamless OTA update feature, and ChromeOS also added support for Android apps. “You will see more examples like this, we are doing some level of cross-pollination, but it is not a merger.”
According to Androidauthority, Google is able to run ChromeOS seamlessly on the Android platform using the AVF virtualization framework. According to TapTechNews, this is a feature introduced in Android 13, providing a secure and private runtime environment for highly sensitive code.
Although AVF was originally designed only for running a stripped-down Android environment in a virtual machine to perform small workloads, technically, it could also be used to run other operating systems. In fact, as early as 2022, a developer (Danny Lin) demonstrated a case of running Win11 on an Android phone, but Google has never officially provided support for running any operating system other than micro Android in AVF.
Androidauthority said that Google recently demonstrated a special version of ChromiumOS (codenamed ferrochrome) in a private event, which successfully ran on the Pixel 8. However, this version of ChromiumOS does not seem to directly output the screen on the phone screen, but is projected onto another monitor. The foreign media speculates that Google is planning to develop a desktop platform similar to Samsung DeX.
Unfortunately, Google did not reveal its specific development plans at this event, nor did it mention whether there are plans to provide special Chromium or ChromeOS systems for existing or future Pixel devices. Instead, it simply demonstrated the ability to run ChromeOS on Android in parallel, and provided tools for smartphone manufacturers to implement this feature. In other words, Google may simply be using the Pixel 8 as a test platform and has no plans to release ChromeOS for the device.