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Google confirms it's 'combining' Chrome OS and Android into a single platform
(www.androidauthority.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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A decade ago this would have been exciting news for mobile computing.
Enough has changed that all I can think is, uuugh.
Also, it will be a license nightmare. As far as I know, Chrome OS is proprietary and actual Android has proper open source license.
Parts of Chrome OS are available, parts aren't. Parts of Android are available, parts aren't. Neither are really Open Source, but both have Open Source parts.
Same with MacOS and iOS. They're doing the same shift Apple has done over the last 25 years. Build on open-source, and slowly pivot to closed-source binaries. The perception of openness lags for a very long time until people finally realize it has just become more proprietary limited crap.
Not really as there is no Apple equivalent to AOSP
Incorrect. MacOS and iOS both started out as Darwin, the Mach microkernel, and FreeBSD. 25 or so years ago, Apple had open repos and package managers to install standard Unix tools, and the core of the OS even used things like cron to schedule tasks. You could even configure MacOS to not launch the GUI and run it command-line only. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
Over time, Apple slowly turned everything into Libraries, Extensions, and Frameworks, and slowly closed-source everything application-by-application. The same way Google is doing with Android.
And if you missed the memo, there is no Google equivalent to AOSP. They killed it in March, because they are doing the exact same thing.
Google can't kill AOSP as it is under the GPL. They will always have to release the source code. Even if a lot of the apps have been abandoned the core system will still be GPL. I don't see them changing that any time soon as it would mean a total rewrite of the OS from scratch which would be insane.
Android also is designed to run on lots of different hardware unlike Apple. I don't really see the comparison.
Apple's OSes are also designed to run on lots of different hardware. Intel, PowerPC, ARM, nVidia, AMD, Apple GPUs. It is just all hardware Apple (mostly these days) designs. There's no reason to talk about what hardware they run on. We're talking about their parallel roadmaps to closing off the OS development from users/open-source, and how both are doing the exact same transition, Apple's is just a quarter century in the making.
Google has already been doing what is necessary to close Android for years. Example: The AOSP texting app they abandoned years ago. Google Messages is now the messaging app. Fully closed-source. No requirement to ever open it. They also used RCS as an excuse to close off the third-party messaging app arena. No third-party app can use RCS on Android now.
Play Services, Assistant, Chrome, YouTube, YouTube Music, GBoard, all their applications are being separated and the "old" version phased out. Some things will remain open-source, likely, like the Chromium bits of Chrome, but even that they've already forked their secret Chrome sauce.
With a hybridization of ChromeOS and Android, this will further accelerate Google not having a need to care about the existence of AOSP. Eventually, they'll just abandon it entirely.
If you use an AOSP-based OS like Graphene right now, you can see the remnants of the AOSP apps. Peeps on projects like Graphene do some massaging to keep them usable, but they're basically apps frozen in time to aid companies in proof-of-concepts and not part of what one would call consumer-facing Android today.
Vendors like Samsung and Lenovo pay to have early access to the Android source, so they'll still get early access for device development, but it is a 100% pay-to-play model. Likely with NDAs. Which again, is exactly what Apple does.
It's only proprietary in much the same way as Android. That's why there are forks like FydeOS.
Two decades ago people would remember when M$ decided to do something very similar on the desktop. Nothing has changed.
I'll thank you not to refer to 2012 as "two decades ago." Felt like I drank from the wrong grail, before double-checking when Windows 8 came out.
Who's talking about Windows 8 or 2012? I said 2 decades and meant it. I wasn't talking about the same time frame, just pointing out the history we are repeating. I was talking about "United States vs Microsoft Corp." (2001). That would have been regarding Windows 98 and Windows XP. ~~Internet Explorer~~Edge is still an integral and unremovable component of Microsoft's operating systems to this day and I guess everyone really has forgotten about Netscape Navigator.
Yeah it's almost like we were talking about something else entirely.
Why bother commenting at all if you're going to be proudly ignorant AND a jerk?
Why did you obliquely reference a different company doing a completely different thing? Microsoft did do something very similar on desktop - making Windows 8 tablet-centric. Nothing in XP or especially 98 has anything to do with mobile computing.
It's not a completely different thing. They were both trying to fully integrate the operating system and the web browser into one monolithic and inescapable thing: Windows XP + Internet Explorer to squash competition on the desktop; Linux + Chrome to squash competition on laptops; Android + Chrome OS to squash competition in the mobile space. The money to be made on operating systems is trivial in the consumer space compared to the power of control over platforms (like web browsers) that deliver advertisements and harvest data from comsumers. M$ saw the writing on the wall way back then in their fight with Netscape Navigator. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I feel like I'm talking to an AI chatbot completely unable to reason abstractly or consider the full context of the conversation.
Ah, so there's a grain of sense in this. Shame about the aggressive irony in whinging about tone while throwing dull insults.
The money to be made on operating systems was power over platforms, back in Windows 98 times. That's the whole reason the Xbox project emerged. They wanted to PC-ify consoles on the assumption they'd still own PCs. The project succeeded! The assumption, not so much.
I think MS barged its way into browsers because it already owned the desktop, and browsers were the next big thing, and barging was just how they did things. And they only integrated IE in the sense you could not uninstall it. Windows obviously still ran Netscape (and later Firefox), and the OS needing a browser is vastly different from the OS being a browser.
Exactly my feelings.