The Future of Computing is … a Tablet? (Premium)

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad in 2010, he prematurely declared it the beginning of the so-called “post-PC era,” a claim that was met by laughter or polite applause depending on the audience. Regardless of where you stand on the PC vs. tablet debate, the intervening years haven’t been kind to Jobs’ prognostication. Yes, the iPad went on to dominate the tablet market, but tablet sales have always trailed those of PCs by a wide margin. And the iPad, like the PC, experienced a several-years-long sales drop-off before rebounding, like the PC, during the pandemic.

What Jobs and Apple accomplished with the iPad is still impressive, of course: they created an enduring market for touch-based, consumption-focused tablets, and in recent years, it’s even made inroads in content creation. And while Amazon, Google, Samsung, and other Android hardware makers rose to the challenge, none of them ever created a tablet business as strong and vibrant as that of the iPad.

As Android’s maker, Google has been involved with tablets both directly and indirectly. It fielded its first Android tablet, the well-regarded Nexus 7, in 2012, just two years after its first Nexus-branded smartphone, and alongside the full-sized Nexus 10. And then it followed up those releases with a new Nexus 7 in 2013 and a Nexus 9 in 2014. And with the Pixel C in 2015, one year before Google’s first Pixel-branded smartphones.

Full-sized Android tablets like the Nexus 10, Nexus 9, and Pixel C were never successful because Android developers, for whatever reason, never broadly embraced tailoring their apps for the larger form factors. Meaning that most Android apps were designed for handsets only and simply appear larger and stretched out on bigger displays. By comparison, Apple’s developer embraced immediately the iPad and its unique features, and the library of iPad-specific apps has been large and of high quality almost from the beginning.

And so Google switched strategies. In 2014, it began adding Android app compatibility to Chrome OS, its web-based desktop OS for Chromebook laptops (and less popular desktop-class PCs). This, combined with the introduction of the Google Play Store for Android and Linux in 2016, fleshed out this once-limited platform, making it more of a direct competitor with Windows and the Mac.

And then the messaging changed: users who wanted Android on a tablet or other larger portable device were advised to get a Chromebook. And Google released its own Chromebook tablet convertible, the Pixel Slate, in 2018, seeking to take on the Microsoft Surface Pro and other PC convertibles and tablets. The Pixel Slate—like the Nexus 10, Nexus 9, and Pixel C—quickly failed, however, and Google canceled plans for two follow-ups, leaving its strategy for Android on larger devices in tatters. A year later, Google released an inexpensive traditional Chromebook, the Pixelbook Go, leading to even more questions.

Then the pandemic happened. Google continued releasing new Pixel-branded smartphones during the horrific last two years, albeit on an often-erratic schedule. But it has never revved or replaced the Pixelbook Go. And it said little publicly about its plans for Android on larger displays until fairly recently.

In October 2021, Google announced something called 12L, which it described as a feature drop—e.g. a set of new and improved features—that would optimize Android for large displays. This new push was initially somewhat confusing—I mistook it for a fork of Android for tablets, similar to Apple’s iPadOS—but today it is better understood to be just the latest attempt by Google to convince developers to better adapt their apps to tablets and other large display devices.

But what drove this change? Why is Google once again adapting Android for tablets and other larger devices instead of just pushing Chrome OS?

As with Microsoft’s sudden renewed interest in Windows and the PC, it was all driven by the pandemic and by the resulting need for devices that are larger than smartphones.

“Large screens have seen some incredible momentum: a 92 percent year-over-year growth in Chrome OS, making it the fastest-growing desktop OS in the world, a 20 percent growth in tablet sales in the last year and a 2.5x growth in foldables sales, the newest and most innovate form factor,” Google vice president Sagar Kamdar wrote at the time. “Altogether, those represent over 250 million active large-screen Android devices, and [now] Android is giving you an OS to match.”

12L is interesting because it adapts the Android OS to large screens rather than just adding features that developers can use to make their own apps look and work better on large screens. If the distinction isn’t obvious, consider some of the features that 12L adds to Android. 12L adds multitasking features like a taskbar and a more discoverable split-screen mode that combine to make it easier to position two Android apps side-by-side on the screen. Google did the work under the covers to let all Android apps work in split-screen rather than requiring developers to do so individually. And because these apps look more like phone apps when they’re side-by-side, even untailored apps look pretty good.

If 12L was Google’s only move to make Android make more sense on larger devices, I doubt I would have written this article. But in recent weeks, the firm has become more vocal about how it now views Android on tablets and other devices.

In a job listing for “Senior Engineering Manager, Android Tablet App Experience” that was first found by 9to5Google, Google noted the following.

“We believe that the future of computing is shifting towards more powerful and capable tablets. We are working to deliver the next chapter of computing and input by launching seamless support across our platforms and hero experiences that unlock new and better ways of being productive and creative.”

That first line might be viewed as a hook for potential job candidates, making the position seem more important than it is. But there’s more. Android co-founder Rich Miner has rejoined Google as CTO of tablets, no less. And in a recent appearance on Google’s in-house The Android Show video series, he provided similarly strong words about Google’s new view on tablets.

“A lot of people are asking what’s different with tablets this time around,” he said, adding that early Android tablet usage was largely consumption-based. “What started to shift was that, around 2019, tablet screens were getting larger, keyboard attach rates were getting much higher, and you started to have some improvements ripple through. Third parties [primarily Samsung] were doing a great job investing in tablets.”

“COVID was certainly an accelerant for that growth. [But] tablets just started to better for things beyond consumption and were being used for creativity and productivity. And there was a need for more screens and devices to support that and it just turns out that tablets are very capable and less expensive than a laptop. Looking at the data, what we saw was that, pre-COVID, in the second half of 2019, larger screen tablet sales started to take off.”

Tablets also came up during the Google for Games Developer Summit 2022 keynote.

“Tablets offer tremendous gaming and media experiences,” Google product director Greg Hartell said. “Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen people around the world buy and use Android tablets more than ever before. And foldable devices are an exciting, innovative form factor as our [hardware maker] partners push the future of mobile devices. 49 percent of people who use their tablet while watching TV use it to play games. For foldables alone, we’ve seen more than a 2.5x increase in device sales year-over-year … foldables put the power of a tablet right in your pocket. For tablets, usage in the home and at work has transformed in recent years, with an almost 20 percent increase in sales. Users are doing more than ever before on tablets.”

With Android usage on Chrome OS also seeing massive growth in the past year—up 50 percent YOY, Google says—and with Google ostensibly having no plans for another in-house Android tablet, I have to assume that this push is about third-parties, for partners like Samsung that make tablets that can compete head-to-head with iPad from a quality perspective, and, of course, that make foldables as well.

And I get that. But with the market as bifurcated as it is—in the Android space alone, there are Android tablets and convertibles, Chromebook tablets and convertibles, and AOSP-based tablets and convertibles from Amazon and others—-it’s unclear whether Google’s sudden interest in tablets will be any longer lived than Microsoft’s sudden interest in Windows and PCs. After all, the pandemic era buying spree can’t—and won’t—last forever.

Worse, it’s inconceivable that any of this work will seriously threaten the iPad, which remains the only truly successful platform in this space. Foldables are interesting, of course, but it’s only a matter of time before an iPhone foldable appears.

And more generally, the problem with tablets, to me, is that they have been largely additive to date. In 2010, Jobs openly wondered whether there was room in the marketplace for another device during the iPad launch event, something between the smartphone and the PC, and he was right in guessing that there was. But for most, the iPad still can’t replace either of those devices. It’s yet another thing to buy, to maintain, and to later upgrade. Foldables may solve the problem—one device than can do the work of two other devices remains an enticing proposition—but that story has yet to be told.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that previous attempts to make smartphones dockable and usable as PC-like devices when connected to a display, keyboard, and mouse have largely failed. Microsoft tried this with Windows Mobile’s Continuum feature, and Samsung’s DeX has never really turned into anything viable for most. It’s likely that some of the functionality in 12L was designed to bring DeX-like functionality to the underlying platform, however. Hope springs eternal.

Given all this, I see Google’s contention that tablets are somehow the future of computing as being mostly marketing. Tablets are certainly a part of the future of computing. But personal computing is getting broader and more diverse, and tablets will sit alongside smartphones, PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, and other devices. Just as they do today.