I’ve written or talked about this exact thing at least a dozen times here at Chrome Unboxed over the past 10 years. Sure, sometimes it’s the dream of ChromeOS powering a phone, but most times all we’ve ever talked about in this particular space is the ability for a phone – most likely a Pixel – to be able to run ChromeOS via dual-boot or a container for desktop applications.
The idea has always been straightforward: let a Pixel phone run Android like normal when not connected to a display, and then allow it to swap to ChromeOS when extended to a larger screen. While the thought of getting ChromeOS in a spot where it could do all the necessary phone stuff is pretty far fetched, the concept of containerizing ChromeOS to easily run on an Android phone has always been intriguing (and within reach) to me. And now it’s actually here.
ChromeOS running on Android in a container
That’s right! @MishaalRahman has successfully made one of my longest-held tech dreams a reality, and it isn’t some hacked, piecemealed solution, either. Instead, this all stemmed from an internal demo that was shown off by Google to display the capabilities of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF). Per Android Authority’s report:
Even though AVF was initially designed around running small workloads in a highly stripped-down build of Android loaded in an isolated virtual machine, there’s technically no reason it can’t be used to run other operating systems. As a matter of fact, this was demonstrated already when developer Danny Lin got Windows 11 running on an Android phone back in 2022. Google itself never officially provided support for running anything other than its custom build of Android called “microdroid” in AVF, but that’s no longer the case. The company has started to offer official support for running Chromium OS, the open-source version of Chrome OS, on Android phones through AVF, and it has even been privately demoing this to other companies.
Whether or not Google is using ChromiumOS simply as a placeholder to show companies what is capable with AVF isn’t quite clear at this time, but the end result of this showcase clearly ended with what basically amounts to ChromeOS running in a container on a Pixel phone and projected to a large display thanks to the Pixel 8’s recently-gained display-out abilities.
It’s wild to think of the ramifications of what this could mean down the road, and Mishaal even went as far as making a video to demo this all up and running right on a Pixel 7 Pro. But don’t think too hard about trying this at home for now: he went through quite a few hoops to make this happen.
Not for now, hopefully for later
According to the report, Google has no plans to ship this sort of setup on a phone any time soon, and thought that’s a bit of a bummer, I’m hopeful that some of the buzz generated by this news will perhaps push development in that direction. Sure, the current setup may just be running this new ‘Ferrochrome’ build of ChromiumOS for now, but there are likely a lot of folks who would be very interested to see an official release using ChromeOS in the future.
And I am most definitely one of them. Having ChromeOS built into a device like the Pixel 9 Pro or the sequel to the Pixel Fold (whatever it ends up being called) would be astounding. There’s plenty of processing power there to push ChromeOS and being able to walk into the office, sit down at the desk, and dock my phone to get my ChromeOS setup running sounds like a dream to me.
With all the ways I’m connected via my Chromebook during the day, I rarely mess with my phone while at work. While I’d love to think Google could rig up some sort of two-way pass-through for apps and notifications between Android and ChromeOS in the AVF container, that may be a step too far for the moment.
But it wouldn’t matter too much as long as the two could run simultaneously. Phone Hub could be beefed up a bit to handle any of the phone-specific things you’d need when docked to a larger screen. And at the end of the day, as long as the AVF environment stayed put even when the session ended, you could yank the phone off the dock, take a call, drop it back in, and return to what you were doing.
While the phone-as-workstation solution wouldn’t be perfect for everyone, it opens up a bunch of doors for a bunch of people that want ultra-portable productivity; or for people like myself who would love the simplicity of carrying around just one device to leverage in different ways throughout the day. It’s wildly intriguing, and something I desperately hope Google is considering as a consumer-facing product at some point down the road a bit.
