My ChromeOS on a phone dreams are shattered…for now

Well, it was fun to dream about it for a few days, right? Earlier this week, a wild report surfaced of a behind the scenes look at the Android Virtualization Framework running ChromiumOS on a Pixel 7 Pro. And it’s one of those things that introduces a new computing paradigm that could have some potentially large ramifications if Google followed through on it.

The dream of having an Android phone in your pocket that could be docked at the desk while running ChromeOS is one that I’ve had for a very long time; and this video proved that it was not just doable in theory, but 100% possible right now with existing technology.

But just as soon as my mind started to wonder about how Google could/should package this sort of thing, it turns out there’s no real interest from Google in actually pursuing this whole thing. Instead, it seems the folks behind the demo simply wanted to showcase the Android Virtualization Framework and dropping in ChromiumOS was a quick way to show that off.

“And so then we were like, ‘we need to do a demo, what would be really cool?’ ‘Let’s put Chrome OS in there, that would be really funny!’ Like, like, could that really work? And it works! But that’s as far as it went. It’s a tech demo. What we’re excited about is the virtualization technology.”

— Dave Burke, VP of Engineering for the Android Platform, speaking on the Android Faithful podcast.

So, that’s that. But maybe – just maybe – the attention that this has garnered may get the ball rolling to actually make this entire thing an official reality. I’m sure many things begin this way as a test or proof of concept and actually become legit applications down the road. And I’m so hopeful that ends up being the case with ChromeOS running on Android.

While I think many of the applications are clear and useful for this, the Android folks behind it (and the ChromeOS team to an extent, too) will need to feel the same way before we see this moving forward. There’s a chance it never moves any farther than the tech demos we’ve seen this week, but I sure hope that’s not the case. Without degrading either Android or ChromeOS, I think this is a way for the two to further combine forces to be something greater.