Google is all setup for their Oct 4th event and for now, we only knew about certain things that going is going to announce in that event. But, apart from the new Pixel phones as a part of the big announcement, Google’s got something new for you too, much bigger than Chromecast Ultra, Google Home, or Google WiFi.
While rumors that Android and Chrome OS would merge are seemingly as old as the co-existence of the operating systems themselves, those rumors began solidifying nearly a year ago. We almost forgot them. But, it looks like that’s getting true. A report from The Wall Street Journal claims that Google was planning to “fold” Chrome OS into Android to better suit the latter to running on a wider variety of hardware. Specifically, Google would fold major portions of Chrome OS into Android to push the resultant hybrid Android OS to a place it has failed to catch on – laptops (and similar devices like convertibles or 2-in-1s).
The Journal went on to claim that this merged OS wouldn’t be ready for primetime until 2017, and we still believe that’s the case. But they did explicitly say that Google would “show off an early version next year [2016].” We weren’t quite prepared to speculate that Google might have a “one more thing” moment with Andromeda, but this tweet has potentially made the connection we couldn’t. What could be as important as the announcement of Android itself? It’s certainly not just some new phones.
We announced the 1st version of Android 8 years ago today. I have a feeling 8 years from now we’ll be talking about Oct 4, 2016.
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) September 24, 2016
These things are almost true because Wall Street Journal was the one to make the prediction about this a year ago. What Andromeda will mean for Android, we really don’t know yet. But if things work out the way we hope they will on the 4th, we may be getting our first glimpse of Google’s vision – Android’s biggest evolution yet. That’s incredibly exciting.
Image source: Wikipedia
