Eric Zeman / Android Authority
Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit is fully underway, and it’s already given us some pretty fascinating news. In addition to Qualcomm announcing its new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, we also got a surprise tease about Google’s upcoming Android-powered PCs.
In November of last year, Android Authority first reported on Google’s plans to merge Chrome OS into Android, unifying phones, tablets, and computers with a single operating system. During the Snapdragon Summit yesterday, Rick Osterloh (Google’s SVP of Devices and Services) took the stage to further tease those intentions.
Osterloh said, “In the past, we’ve always had very different systems between what we are building on PCs and what we are building on smartphones,” and that Google has “embarked on a project to combine that.” As if that wasn’t clear enough, Osterloh further commented that Google is “building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems.”
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In other words, the rumors about Google merging Chrome OS with Android are true, and we’re headed toward a future where we have Android-powered PCs. That’s an exciting thing to think about, especially with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon saying he’s seen the project and that “it is incredible.” However, not everyone agrees with that sentiment.
There’s a heated discussion about Google’s Android PC project on the r/Android subreddit, and upon reading through some of the comments, it’s overwhelmingly obvious that people share a major concern about Android-powered PCs: openness.
Paul Jones / Android Authority
At the time of writing, the top comment on the Reddit thread reads, “Imagine a computer, but you can only install software that Google permits you to. How revolutionary!” Another comment says, “A closed ecosystem like my phone on a desktop? No thank you,” while another states, “Take the Free and Open Linux Kernel and build proprietary BS on top of it and make it restrictive to the playstore, what a joke!”
The more you scroll through the thread, the more comments like this you find. Another person writes, “Can’t wait to have an Android PC with no sideloading. Truly,” while someone else says, “PC and closed ecosystem don’t go well together. It’s like driving a plane through a road instead of using it to fly, it’s just stupid.”
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