Androids, Chromebooks, and Tablets, Oh My (Premium)

What the heck is going on at Google?

It shouldn’t be this difficult. But then Android has always been a fast follower, a platform that arrived in the wake of Apple’s original iPhone announcement and has been tagging along ever since, like an annoying younger sibling.

Yes, Apple and Google have decidedly different go-to-market strategies–Apple goes it alone, focuses on selling hardware devices, and has quirky ideas about user experiences, while Google open sources Android, partners with hardware makers, focuses more on its software platforms than its hardware, and offers more traditional or even conservative user interfaces–but the dynamic has never really changed.

Apple delivers a premium experience with vast integration across its ecosystem. And Google targets the masses, with less consistency and a far more disjointed ecosystem in which no product or service is safe.

Where Apple is calm and steady, Google is volatile. Apple ships new products when they’re ready. Google ships new products and then seems almost eager to kill them off when they don’t meet its needs.

That both ecosystems speak to the ideals of their respective user bases is perhaps obvious. But I’ve found myself torn between the two over the years, and I suspect my experience isn’t unique. Sometimes I long for a world in which everything just works, but I sometimes find that world boring or even restrictive. I bounce back and forth between the two, always identifying the advantages and disadvantages of each, but neither is perfect, or at least so good that it obviates the other. It’s like being on a rollercoaster or, to stick with the bouncing theme, in a pinball machine.

That the Apple/Google dynamic maps directly to the Apple/Microsoft dynamic of the PC era is, of course, perfect. We’ve described various companies as “the next Microsoft” over time, but the parallels with Google are too obvious to ignore. Where Apple makes a closed mobile platform, Google makes an open mobile platform. The closed platform guarantees a certain level of quality and integration, and the open platform promises the same, but never quite delivers. But it side-steps the complaints by offering choice, lots of choice. And lower prices. On and on we go.

When Apple introduced the iPad, Google adapted Android for tablets. When Apple introduced the Apple Watch, Google adapted Android for wearables. When Apple created its own mobile chipsets, Google created custom chips for its devices and then its own mobile chipsets. Apple makes earbuds, so Google makes earbuds. Apple charges 30 or 15 percent feeds in its online store, so Google does too. Apple finally experienced slower growth, so it expanded into subscription services, and so Google did too. There are competing digital personal assistants, smart home ecosystems, TV solutions, and now AI strategies. It never ends.

Google was so good at being Microsoft in this new era that it even beat Microsoft at its own game. By the time Microsoft finally responded to the iPhone with Windows Phone, Google had nothing to fear: Android used the same open licensing model that Microsoft had earlier perfected, but with a twist: Android was free, or at least very inexpensive, but Microsoft was addicted to licensing fees. When Microsoft finally responded to the iPad with Surface, Google had nothing to fear: Melding a desktop OS with mobile apps was, at best awkward–even Apple has failed at this mashup, for the most part–and Surface sent the entire PC market rushing into Google’s arms to embrace its desktop platform. Called Chrome OS.

Ah, Chrome OS.

Only Google could have come up with Chrome OS. This is the type of product that comes from not thinking differently per se, but from a decidedly Googly view of the world. Google is a company that once cobbled together its corporate infrastructure using off-the-shelf hardware purchased from Fry’s Electronics, and its software stack was similarly cobbled together using free, open source languages and toolkits. Google was worn of the web, and on the web, and Google’s world-view is thus very different from that of Microsoft. Where Microsoft will build out a complex infrastructure, a platform, to fill a need, Google just cobbles something together. And once it had decided to make its own web browser, to make sure its online services ran as well as possible, turning that thing into a desktop OS was relatively easy. It’s just a stripped down Linux–a free, open source OS–with a Chrome web browser bolted on top.

But the word “just” is perhaps unfair there. In making a web-first and web-based desktop platform, a relatively simple thing compared to the house of cards that is Windows today, Google also accomplished something profound. It created something simpler, more efficient, and more secure. It created a product that just works, and without drama or complexity, a product that’s “good enough”–one of my favorite terms–for many or even most people. If you can get over basic inertia–familiarity–and some perhaps too specific app needs/wants, Chrome OS is pretty sweet. And it’s only gotten better over the years, with an optional Linux environment for running true desktop apps and, more importantly, full Android compatibility. Chrome OS was derided as a joke in certain circles for years. And then it got good. And then really good.

Naturally, Google is now killing it.

Well, more accurately, Google is rumored to be killing it. The company announced this past summer that it would move some of the underpinnings of Chrome OS to the Android tech stack for compatibility reasons–Android is in use on several billion devices and is well understood from a driver perspective by hardware and peripheral makers–and … that made sense to me. Creating common underpinnings for these two platforms, and basing that on the far more popular of the two, makes sense. It’s pragmatic. But now we have word that Google is apparently going to get rid of Chrome OS and replace it with Android. It will allegedly keep the Chromebook brand. But future Chromebooks will run Android, and not Chrome OS.

And that is … troubling. And on so many levels.

Aside from the obvious–Chrome OS is this simple, predictable thing that works well–this scheme is representative of everything that is wrong with Google and the way it does things. It speaks to decades of chaos and uncertainty, of products and services that Google unceremoniously killed, leaving users who loved those things stranded. But most of all, it speaks to the central problem with Google’s software platforms. Which is simply stated.

Google has no idea what it’s doing. It never has. And it keeps changing things because that’s what happens when you cobble together platforms on the fly. It is astonishing to me how often Google’s OS strategies have changed, and how ill-conceived and erratic the company looks as a result. No, not looks. Is.

Consider the tumultuous history of Chrome OS. In 2010, Google released its first Chromebook, the CR-48, which it described as a prototype. I may still have mine: Google gave me one that year. It was simple, but limited, and the offline capabilities that many still erroneously complain about were then mostly just an idea for the future. Hardware makers delivered several sub-$500 Chromebooks in the next year or so, and so Google naturally followed that up with its Chromebook Pixel, which featured a 3:2 display and an expensive $1300+ price tag that demanded unfair comparisons with MacBooks and high-end Windows laptops.

I wanted one. It made no sense–literally zero sense–but I wanted one.

I held off, however, until 2017 and the release of the Google Pixelbook, an even more elegant Chromebook that was less expensive than its predecessor but still commanded a heady $999 or more. There was a lot to like about this device, but it is perhaps telling that it arrived in the wake of Google’s decision to use Chrome OS, and not Android, in tablets. Why? Because Android sucked on tablets despite years of adapting the OS and practically begging developers to adapt their apps.

By and large, they did not: Though developers have routinely followed Apple down any platform rabbit hole it decided to build, those same developers have likely routinely ignored Google’s platform innovations. So where iPad users got–and still get–newly tailored apps that look and work well on those larger displays, Android users got phone apps, upscaled and not adapted in the slightest. Even Google’s own apps were problematic in that way, and that didn’t get better until the past year or two.

A platform maker not doing what it told partners and third-party developers to do. Now where have I heard that story before? Ah, right. Microsoft. Microsoft, which released WPF in 2006 and then never used it in its own mainstream apps. Microsoft, which released Windows 8/RT in 2012 without a native version of Office. You know, that Microsoft. Well, Google is the next Microsoft. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by this. But it’s worse than that. Google wasn’t done changing strategies. Indeed, each time we blinked, it seemed, there was a new direction.

Google had released a Pixel C tablet–a sort of Surface-like Android device–in 2015, for $500 and up. But that didn’t sell well, so it moved onto Chrome OS. Briefly. Google’s foray into Chrome OS tablets resulted in the Pixel Slate, a one-off whose time in the sun was so brief you’re forgiven for not remembering it. Google announced Pixel Slate in October 2018 with prices starting at $599. And then it killed Pixel Slate barely six months later, planning to focus Chrome OS, once again, on laptops. It released the Pixelbook Go later that year as a cheaply made Chromebook.

So back to Android it was. In 2022, Google released its first–and maybe its last–Pixel Tablet. Based on Android, and with a reasonable selection of tailored apps, the Pixel Tablet was all kinds of wrong–wrong aspect ratio, too much focus on the bundled dock and its half-assed smart display capabilities–but it was followed up by the Pixel Fold, Google’s first folding phone and, arguably, its best tablet (or tablet-like) device since the Nexus 7 of yesteryear. Android was back, baby.

Meanwhile, Google pushed Chrome OS back into the high-end of the market that it had championed with the original Chromebook Pixel, though this time with third parties. It introduced Chromebook Plus in late 2023, giving power users better specifications at still-reasonable prices and, more to the point, improved AI capabilities to match what Microsoft was doing in Windows and Microsoft 365 with Copilot. Like so much with this platform, Chromebook Plus makes sense to me.

Which explains why Google is–allegedly–killing the platform now. You can easily imagine the decision makers at Google, an oxymoron if there ever was one, it seems–spinning a wheel and cackling madly and high-fiving each other when the needle lands on “Kill it.” Surely, there’s more that goes into these choices. But maybe not.

Yes, Android is in a good place right now. But so, too, is Chrome OS. And while combining the two–meaning, killing one and replacing it with the other–is likely a cost-saving move above all else, it feels wrong. These two things can coexist. Have coexisted, throughout all the tumult.

What they haven’t done is thrive. Chromebooks sell well in certain quarters, mostly education, but they are a tough sell with consumers in ways that must be frustrating to the Android maker. All the pieces are there to counter Apple: Multiple partners, many devices and form factors, lots of choice, low prices, and that continued drumbeat of stability, security, and certainty. And yet where Android has flown high, beaten back to the iPhone to some degree with its open promises and lower prices, Chrome OS has flat-lined. It’s there. It works. But it’s not exciting. It’s not the next big thing.

And so now it appears that Google has Stadia-ed Chrome OS, has sent it to that big Google Reader in the sky. That makes me sad. But there’s also a ray of hope. It will be 2025 soon. And that means that we’ll almost certainly see another Google OS strategy emerge. And maybe, just maybe, Chrome OS will come roaring back.

It’s happened before. And Google? Only Google is crazy enough to do this to us all again.