Towards the end of last week, an interesting report emerged. The report came from the Wall Street Journal in where sources “familiar with the matter” had highly indicated that Android and Chrome OS would cease to operate as independent entities and instead would converge to become a “single operating system“. In terms of the details, very little was actually provided by the sources other than the fact that Android would absorb Chrome OS and the complete absorption was scheduled for sometime in 2017.
Well, interestingly, Google has sent out a blog posting this morning which is entitled “Chrome OS is here to stay.” As the title suggests, the aim of this post is to try and clarify some of the information that has come through over the last few days which has led to the speculation around the merging of the two systems. That said, in spite of what’s seems to be a climate-relevant blog posting, Google does not provide too much clarification on that matter, with the most clearly defining statement reading “While we’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there’s no plan to phase out Chrome OS.”
As such, Google does make it clear that there is no plans to phase out Chrome OS and the blog posting even looks to reassure those of the continuous existence of Chrome OS by detailing that they “have plans to release even more features for Chrome OS” in the coming months. Some of those listed include a new media player, Material Design refresh and better security. The blog post does detail that there will be many more Chromebooks coming in 2016 and although this is a declaration of support for the platform, it is worth pointing out that the hybrid operating system was not touted to arrive until 2017. It was suggested a version might be shown off to the world in 2016 and if this is the case, it would seem likely that it would be at Google’s I/O event. Either way though, if a new common operating system is announced, it seems as well as this new system, Google does have some plans, in some capacity, to keep Chrome OS alive.