Leaks confirm Parallels on Chromebooks is dead in the water

It’s been quite some time since we last talked about Parallels for ChromeOS. As a matter of fact, I was talking about it to a prospective Chromebook buyer just a few days ago and as we were talking, I realized just how long it had been since I’d heard anything new on that front in the Chromebook space. Spoiler alert: it’s been a while.

As a matter of fact, it’s been over two years since the last bit of news referencing Parallels made an appearance here at Chrome Unboxed. And, according to a source familiar with the project, it seems that sort of lack of attention has been par for the course for quite some time behind the scenes as well. And very soon, the end will be here for the entire Parallels-on-Chromebook experiment.

Parallels on ChromeOS won’t make it past 2024

According to that same source, it seems there haven’t been any meaningful updates to Parallels on ChromeOS for nearly a year and a half, and the time has come to shut things down. Current customers will be informed before the official announcement, but we expect to hear something formally before the end of 2024.

With the introduction of Cameyo and then the merger with Google that brought the company’s VAD (virtual app delivery) service to ChromeOS, I feel like the writing has been on the wall for a while. Parallels offered a way to run native Windows applications right on a Chromebook, but the need to run the entire desktop to do so is clunky at best, and incredibly frustrating at worst.

Cameyo and VAD give users who need legacy apps a simpler, cleaner way to deliver those applications on an app-by-app basis, instead of forcing users to deal with the entire Windows desktop environment.

Still, I always thought it was a pretty cool thing to have multiple options available for users. It looks like that won’t be the case soon, and if you are reading this and are a Parallels user, it’s probably a good time to look into something like Cameyo for your legacy app needs sooner than later.