Google is testing ‘Android Desktop’ on Chromebooks, and I’m not sure what to think

With the potentially massive, foundational shift of ChromeOS to the Android kernel on the horizon, there’s been a ton of speculation about what the future of our favorite operating system will actually look like. Will it feel the same? Will it be a true fusion of the two platforms? Will ChromeOS continue largely unchanged with only the underlying bits realigned?

Well, a strange and fascinating new clue has just surfaced that adds another layer to this mystery. A new commit in the Chromium Gerrit, first spotted by Chromebook Live, shows that Google is actively testing something called “Android Desktop” on a range of relatively-modern Chromebooks.

The clue in the code

The commit itself is for a routine bug fix, but the commit message contains a very peculiar and telling phrase. It explicitly references “brya devices running Android Desktop.”

For those who don’t follow the development scene, ‘Brya’ is the baseboard for a huge swath of modern, 12th-gen Intel-powered Chromebooks, including devices like the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE and HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook. Seeing this well-known ChromeOS platform referenced as running “Android Desktop” is a strange and completely unexpected development.

So, what is going on here?

My immediate thought is that this could be related in some way to the upcoming Android kernel merge. As Google works to bring the two operating systems closer together at a foundational level, it makes sense that they would be running all sorts of experiments on existing Chromebook hardware.

While it feels like a bit of a stretch at this point, you also have to consider the most extreme possibility: could this be an early sign of Google exploring a path to one day migrate Chromebooks from ChromeOS to a new, desktop-focused version of Android? I’m not really sure what to think, but it’s an odd thing to be testing, and it opens up a wide range of possibilities for the future.

For now, this is just a single, fascinating commit in the wider Chromium Gerrit. But it’s a clear sign that Google is experimenting in big ways as it figures out what the next chapter of ChromeOS will look like. While Google has hinted at some things to us behind the scenes for sure, we simply don’t know exactly what the future of ChromeOS will look like from a technical standpoint. Big changes under the hood are on the way, however; that much is for sure. Stay tuned.