A story posted late Thursday by The Wall Street Journal citing unnamed sources said that Alphabet plans to unveil a single, new operating system in 2017 and that Google engineers have been already working for two years to combine Android and Chrome OS.
In an apparent response to that story, Hiroshi Lockmeimer, senior vice president of Android and Chrome OS at Alphabet, tweeted, “There’s a ton of momentum for Chromebooks and we are very committed to Chrome OS.”
One chief advantage of combining the two OSs would be to give users of Chromebooks – laptops that run the Chrome OS – the ability to access Android apps, which far outnumber the apps for Chromebooks and run on millions of Android smartphones and tablets.
The idea of combining Chrome OS and Android has been around for years, but there is a widespread debate as to whether it is better to keep an OS for laptops and PCs separate from the OS that runs on smartphones and tablets. Apple keeps them separate with Mac and iOS, but Microsoft combines them in Windows 10.
Lockmeimer’s contradiction doesn’t emphatically say that Alphabet would never combine the two OSs, and he doesn’t deny that there are Google engineers working to combine the two.
A spokesperson for Alphabet could not be reached immediately to comment.
Ramon Llamas, an analyst at IDC said: “I like the idea. Developers can take a ‘develop once, deploy on all Google-powered devices’ approach which avoids a lot of reprogramming.”
IDG News Service
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