Thinking About Android Laptops ⭐

Qualcomm and Google talked up so-called Android laptops last week during the Snapdragon Summit 2025 conference in Maui, Hawaii. Why they did this is unclear, given the lack of details and the year-off timing for the first products. But I have some ideas.

? This is all Apple’s fault

What Apple accomplished with iPadOS 26 is nothing short of astonishing. Not because the iPad hasn’t been capable of this desktop-like productivity functionality for many years—it has—but because Apple usually makes changes like this one slow step at a time. But now that iPadOS 26 is broadly available, those who want to can use an iPad like a laptop, and effectively. In fact, I think this to be the perfect computer for most people, a simple yet powerful device that can do it all.

But what if there was another?

? Google nailed it on the phone, but everywhere else not so much

There is this other mobile platform called Android. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Android is also available on phones and tablets, and all kinds of other devices, but Google’s solution in the laptop market has been an even simpler—one might say constrained—device called Chromebook. These laptops are interesting: They can run Android apps and even Linux apps, and they come with a full desktop version of the Chrome web browser. And Google has in recent years started to push Chromebooks to more sophisticated users via its Chromebook Plus initiative.

I’m over-simplifying there. Google has, in fact, changed strategies several times and has pushed Android and Chromebook on tablets and 2-in-1s at different times. I think it’s fair to say that it’s tried to find the most effective way to take on Apple in mobile beyond the smartphone and has come up short each time. But hope springs eternal.

?️ First clues that things were changing (again)

A little over a year ago, we received our first hints at yet another strategy for Chromebooks. Google revealed that it was replacing key parts of the low-level ChromeOS stack, those parts related to drivers, with the corresponding Android code because it would be easier to support and there was much more activity, and thus higher-quality code, on the Android side.

This immediately raised questions about the respective futures of these two platforms. A few months later, a report claimed that Google was, in fact, undertaking a multi-year project to completely transition the ChromeOS codebase to Android. This also immediately raised questions. And though this shift is completely understandable, those who prize ChromeOS for its simplicity were (and still are) justifiably nervous.

This past June, Google finally broke the silence about its plans when Android president Sameer Samat said during a seemingly random interview that Google was “combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform,” and he specifically mentioned laptops and what it is that customers (and potential customers) are doing on these devices. It’s perhaps not coincidental that this statement came just a week after Apple held the WWDC event at which it announced iPadOS and its work to make the iPad a laptop-like productivity tool.

One month after that, Google provided just a bit of clarity when it said that ChromeOS and Android would continue to co-exist, with an upcoming version of ChromeOS transitioning to the Android codebase. Or, as Samat said at the time, “we’re building the ChromeOS experience on top of Android underlying technology to unlock new levels of performance, iterate faster, and make your laptop and phone work better together.” So the OS is (and, in the case of ChromeOS, will be) Android. But if you get a Chromebook—assuming Google doesn’t change the brand—ChromeOS will be an “experience” on top of Android. A desktop experience.

? Android 16

This, too, is confusing in its own way, but tied to all these developments, Google in late 2024 announced that it would change the annual Android development timeline, with the next version at the time, Android 16, shipping in Q2 2025 instead of the usual Q3 timeframe. This resulted in a shorter than usual development period, and so the post-release quarterly updates, called Quarterly Platform Releases (QPRs), would take on even more importance as they would deliver core Android 16 features that might otherwise have shipped in the initial release.

Google released Android 16 in June, but it was a little light on major new features. Among the bigger advances that would ship more fully later on was a new desktop environment that allows Android to look and work like more traditional desktop OSes like Windows, complete with Start Menu and Taskbar-like UIs, floating app windows, and so on. This work is unsurprisingly based on Samsung DeX, an Android-based desktop system that first shipped in 2017 on the company’s flagship phones and triggers when the device is connected to a USB display or dock. As it turns out, Samsung and Google, longtime partners, have been working even more closely together in recent years.

Google shipped a basic version of this desktop mode in Android 16, and I’ve been watching to see whether any of the subsequent quarterly updates, so far QPR1, which shipped in August, and QPR2, currently in beta, included any improvements. Not yet. My expectation was that we would eventually hear from Google that some QPR would finally put this new desktop mode over the top. And that the new underlying platform for ChromeOS would ship on top of that. Or maybe this was an Android 17 timeframe. It wasn’t clear.

And then Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2025 happened. And though there are still so many questions, we heard about this work, referenced as an “Android laptop,” not once. But twice.

? Enter the dragon

On the opening day of the Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon delivered a surprisingly interesting vision keynote. About 38 minutes into this talk, he was joined on stage by Google senior vice president of devices and services Rick Osterloh. And after discussions about their partnership and the work they’ve done together in VR/XR and automotive, Amon went in an unexpected direction.

“There is something else we’re working on together and it’s something we’re incredibly excited about,” he began. “Which is how we’re thinking about personal computing. So what can you share about what we’re doing together for this new project at Google for personal computing?”

Suffice to say, my ears perked up a bit as he asked this.

“We are combining together …” Osterloh began before rephrasing. “Our strategy overall is to bring really, really rich computing experiences to every category. We talked about autos, we talked about XR, we talked about smartphones, of course. In the past, we always had really different systems between what we were building on PCs and what we were building on smart phones. And we’ve embarked on a project to combine that. We are building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems. And this is another way that we can leverage all the great work we’re [Google and Qualcomm] doing together on our AI stack, our full stack, bringing Gemini models, bringing the assistant, all of our application and developer community, into the PC domain. So we’re really excited about this, and I think this is another way in which Android is going to be able to serve everyone and every computing category.”

“By the way, I’ve seen it,” Amon said. “It’s incredible. I think it delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC. And I can’t wait to have one.”

And then he moved on.

The next day, toward the end of the product announcement keynote, Qualcomm’s Alex Katouzian welcomed Google president of Android Sameer Samat, who had previously divulged information about this work, on stage to discuss how Google was thinking about Gemini and multi-device experiences. And yes, this segment also swerved into the coming Android push on computers.

“Let’s talk about productivity on a large screen computing environment,” Katouzian said. “I think android and ChromeOS have long been a larger screen platforms and now with Gemini coming into the picture how do you see compute?”

[Qualcomm refers to desktop-type computing as “compute,” as opposed to mobile.]

He wasn’t done.

“And the second part of the question,” Katouzian continued, “is the experience elevated with other devices getting involved in that as well. For a long time mobile phones and PCs have been communicating, but now we are in a different state where the assistant can follow you from place to place. And we have this opportunity with large screen compute to add that in.”

“I think it’s obvious that we all want our devices to work seamlessly together,” he said. “And in the Android ecosystem, we have all these different devices, and you want your AI to work across all of them. So that’s the new area, and that’s what we’re driving toward.”

This is an interesting idea, and it may point to the real impetus to bring Android into ChromeOS, or at least the issue that put the need to do this work over the top. Like Microsoft, Google is essentially betting the company on AI. And getting Gemini across the stack will be a lot simpler, and will happen a lot faster, if Google can work off a single client codebase. Otherwise, ChromeOS would just be behind the rest of the industry all the time. (Well, except for Apple. Cough.)

“If you think about the laptop form factor, we’ve had ChromeOS for a long time, and we’re super-committed to that platform, and it’s been really successful for us. We learned a lot from it as well. And we also have android tablets, which have been super-successful. They’re becoming more productivity machines all the time. So I think the opportunity for us that we see is how do we accelerate all the AI advancement we are doing on Android and bring that to the laptop form factor as rapidly as possible. And also have the laptop and the rest of the Android ecosystem work seamlessly together.”

“What we’re doing is, we’re taking the ChromeOS experience and we’re rebaselining the technology underneath it on Android. That combination is something we’re super-excited about for next year. We are working with you and others on it, and we cannot wait.”

? A few take-aways

I have a couple of thoughts about all this.

This puts the new (and unexpected) Google desktop app in perspective, as it should be seen as another way, as is the case with the Chrome web browser, to get Gemini on the most widely-used desktop platform. And I wonder if there’s a Mac version coming soon as well.

Also, it’s a bit curious to me that Qualcomm specifically arranged to have a preview of this Android/ChromeOS hybrid occur at an event at which it was announcing two things: A new flagship chip for Android phones, which is on point, but also a new flagship chip that will run Windows, not ChromeOS or Android.

But maybe that is the point.

Last year, I made the point that the Snapdragon X Elite processor might be even more beneficial to Chromebooks than it is to Windows. The theory there is that the only native apps you can run on these devices are Android apps, and so delivering a powerful Arm-based processor would benefit Android apps greatly as well.

Two things happened later. Qualcomm announced that its latest (at the time) flagship processor for Android phones and tablets would utilize the same new architecture found in the PC-based Snapdragon X Elite. And then we learned that Intel did what Intel has historically done when threatened: It paid Google and its partners to adopt its x86-based Core Ultra “Lunar Lake” processors for new Chromebook Plus devices. And so we were left to wonder what a Chromebook with a powerful and efficient Arm processor might be like.

Since then, MediaTek announced a Copilot+ PC-class chip specifically for Chromebook Plus laptops. And the first to ship with this silicon is widely regarded as the best Chromebook ever. In moving the underlying base of ChromeOS to Android, however, Google can explicitly support the latest and best Snapdragon chips. And so maybe this 2026 “Android laptop” push, which is at least partially really just a new generation Chromebook laptop push, is about that.

I write partially there because there’s also room for true Android-based laptops and 2-in-1s, and for this ongoing idea about phones and tablets that transform into desktop-type PCs when docked or connected to a screen. Maybe this isn’t about any one thing.

Regardless of the details, there is a lot going on here and I bet it’s more involved than many realize. From the outside, the notion of an Android-based laptop may seem like Google throwing more spaghetti at the wall to see if it can finally get something to stick. But it’s clear to me now that its plans have evolved over time and that the timeline for this combination was accelerated by its broader AI ambitions.

And that makes sense: It’s nice to be proactive, but it’s more common for corporate strategies to be reactive. To bring this back to the discussion around the iPad and iPadOS 26, the big question is, why now? After all, Apple could have easily done this work years ago. But I think the stunning productivity advances in iPadOS 26 are part of a broader effort at Apple, one that also involves Liquid Glass, to get investors and customers to forget about its Apple Intelligence miscues. Not innovative my ass, as someone terrible cockily observed years ago.

To be clear, turning Android into a desktop OS, whether by itself, in a desktop mode with mobile devices, or as part of a Chromebook is, in some ways, not super-important, as Samat said repeatedly. The real story here is Gemini and getting that working as seamlessly as possible on as many devices as possible. But for me and, I suspect, many of you, this is far more interesting. And it speaks to that thing I’ve discussed a lot recently because of iPadOS: Personal computing on the desktop, whether it’s Windows, the Mac, or Linux, is simply too complex and unreliable.

If Google can get Android to that same magical place where Apple finally landed with iPadOS 26, it will make personal computing better for millions of people. And that is a good thing. I am very curious to see how this plays out.