ChromeOS will ’embrace’ more Android — for more AI features, faster

If you’re sick of AI being shoved into in more and more consumer electronics, then you’re in good company: I’m sick of writing about it. But Google most decidedly is not sick of it.

In fact, Google is trying to inject its own AI into every one of its products. That includes both Android and ChromeOS, which are getting a little closer to each other to achieve this end goal.

According to the latest Chromium blog post, the Google-developed laptop and desktop system will be “embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, as part of the foundation of ChromeOS.” The point is to iterate and deliver more Google AI features, and to do it faster than could be possible if the mobile and laptop platforms remained as distinct.

Why exactly is this necessary? That isn’t clear. The blog post is light on technical details, though it does say we won’t see any big changes hit consumer hardware for “quite some time.”

Even in their current iterations, Android and Chrome are hardly strangers. Plenty of Chromebooks run on Arm-based processors. Some (but not all) Android apps on the Google Play Store can be downloaded and run on Chromebooks with ease. They even share some internal code, like a unified Bluetooth stack.

Google is all-in on its generative AI plans, with the Google I/O showcase being wall-to-wall AI and new features for the more premium Chromebook Plus sub-category announced last month. The more advanced version of Google’s Gemini AI assistant (née Bard) is bundled with two terabytes of Google Drive cloud storage for $20 per month, competing directly with Microsoft’s Copilot Pro system.