Google's plans for its Android phone software have been clear: Grow the role of its Gemini AI assistant to handle more tasks and make it integral to most people's activities. The company's strategy for its lightweight ChromeOS for laptops and tablets is less clear, especially as Google teased earlier this year that it would be combined with Android.
On the keynote stage at Snapdragon Summit 2025, executives Alex Katouzian from Qualcomm and Sameer Samat from Google finally gave us a window for when this software merger would happen: "next year" or sometime in 2026. But it wasn't until I sat down with those executives for a behind-closed-doors chat that I got a fuller picture of what this will mean for everything using ChromeOS -- and what will change when it incorporates Android, which is run on the majority of devices worldwide.
But first, Samat -- president of Android ecosystem -- reassured that ChromeOS wasn't going anywhere. Instead, Android tech will augment the laptop operating system, especially with -- hold your surprise -- all the AI integration they've worked to bring to the mobile space.
"We're fully committed to ChromeOS," Samat said. "It's natural to sort of look at ChromeOS, the user experience and Android [with] the underlying tech stack and say, 'What can we do to combine these two things together in a way that allows us to innovate more quickly on AI?'"
Google's Sameer Samat shaking Qualcomm's Alex Katouzian's hand on stage at the keynote for Snapdragon Summit 2025. David Lumb/CNET
The goal is to build a more cohesive experience among Android products, especially premium devices. That's where Qualcomm comes in. Its new mobile Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and PC platform Snapdragon X2 Elite chips are aimed at the top tiers of portable, powerful, yet battery-efficient devices along the spectrum of phones, tablets and laptops. As consumers own several of those devices and start adding wearables or smart glasses, it's advantageous to incorporate Android into their tech foundations.
"We're going to go to the next generation of computing -- maybe it's MR, VR, AR capabilities -- and we're going to extend that. They're going to coexist. We want to participate in all of them," said Katouzian, Qualcomm's group general manager of mobile, compute and the XR business unit. "But then what's more important is the agent, namely Gemini, will connect all these devices."
Positioning Gemini as the glue holding all your devices together aligns neatly with the picture Qualcomm painted at this year's Snapdragon Summit of using AI agents as the interface. Instead of searching through apps, you just ask questions as the agent searches for you. Refined AI models and silicon get us closer to this vision, but Qualcomm has been beating this drum for a while.
The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 is one of CNET's best-rated Chromebooks. Josh Goldman/CNET
But even if AI agents don't take over everyone's interfaces by the time Android merges with ChromeOS, there are still significant benefits, Samat explained. An obvious one is for ChromeOS to shift from emulating Android applications to running them natively, which should boost performance and gain better mouse and keyboard support.
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