A few months ago, Google announced it was going to put Android on laptops (and eventually, desktops), serving as eventual replacements for Chromebooks. Unlike those, though, these new Android laptops wouldn’t be low-quality, cheap, underpowered devices for school children to spill milk on, but devices actually competitive with Windows and macOS laptops. Today, the company finally allowed the press to use these new things.
Google describes Googlebook as a “totally fresh approach to computing,” bringing together Android, ChromeOS, Gemini, and premium laptop hardware from major manufacturers.
The idea is to create a laptop that feels more natural to use for Android phone users while retaining what makes a desktop OS useful, such as a full Chrome browser, desktop apps, a proper file manager, Linux support, and a full terminal environment.
Google is also trying to solve some of the biggest problems Android users have had when moving between their phone and laptop, and make the two devices feel like part of the same ecosystem.
↫ Adamya Sharma at Android Authority
I’ve been looking at some of the videos of people using and playing with these new Android laptops, and to be honest, I’m not impressed. I’m seeing quite a bit of jank, a complete lack of consistency, and apparently, a lack of Android applications optimised for desktop use. The close integration with your Android phone are nice, but of course, this also means another dollop of slimy lock-in, as I highly doubt Google will make it easy or even possible at all for, say, iPhones or other platforms to integrate quite as nicely as Android devices will.
Worse yet, there’s the elephant in the room: for just how long will Google care about this new platform? These laptops start at $900 and go all the way up to $1300 (and will be considerably more expensive here in Europe), which is a lot to ask for something Google might get bored of and abandon in a few years’ time. Ten or more years ago, in a slightly more innocent time, I might’ve been excited about Google bringing Android to laptops and desktops, but in 2026, I just can’t be bothered to care.
Also, and this doesn’t really matter, but “Googlebook OS”?
Google will need to eventually realize and use GNU/Linux with something like KDE if they want to compete with Windows and macOS, other gimmicks likely won’t do.
This would guarantee that they would never be able to go beyond uber-geek niche. Could grab maybe 3-5% of desktop and that the most it may do with that setup.
Google is apparently not interested in that (even if first version of Googlebooks is unlikely to get more, but that’s very different from ensuring that they would NEVER go beyond that).
To be honest, my immediate concern with anything like this is owner rights and vendor lock-in. I don’t trust google to respect owner rights. I worry that google are dead set on locking down the hardware so that it cannot be used independently from google’s tentacles. Integration is useful and important, but that should be done through open standards that give users the freedom to choose & switch services.
I suspect most osnews readers will agree with this sentiment, but corporations including google don’t really care about us insofar as they see a path to critical mass without us. Whenever walled garden services succeed, even those of us who protest them can end up being coerced to go with the flow.
Google’s prohibition on alternative android app stores distributing apps that haven’t registered with google is almost here (2027 for everyone).
https://gagadget.com/en/671314-no-more-apk-google-will-block-the-installation-of-unknown-apps-at-the-system-level-from-2027/
I suspect this “googlebook” is going to be a highly restricted platform that positions google to have control over everything. Owners won’t get a say over their own hardware. I hope I am mistaken, but everywhere we look these days corporations are bent on enshitifying technology across the board. The outlook for mainstream computing is bad. IMHO we’re already loosing the battle for openness on mobile. Fortunately the open desktop is stronger, but we need people voting against this crap with their feet otherwise we risk becoming marginalized over the long term.
Android is still mostly open. You can still install unsigned apps, as long as you tap a few things and wait 24-hours. What I am worried is Google further tightening the screws and banning unsigned apps completely. Or imposing restrictions on the content of the apps they sign (something they haven’t done so far).
At the end of the day, you can’t have 32% of smartphone users worldwide and 60% of US smartphone users rewarding Apple for selling a heavily locked-down OS and expect other companies to remain honest.
That’s why if someone is a tech-literate person, tech-literate enough to understand what Apple is doing with iOS (that is, locking sideloading since day 1) but still buys iOS devices, that person is a bad person who makes the world a worse place. Yes, I am serious.
kurkosdr,
I wish regulators had intervened far sooner with apple’s anticompetitive platform. The market damage has been significant. The EU’s lawsuits against apple give lip service to the problem but they’re late by decades. All the horses are long gone. I don’t think we’re going to regain the losses on mobile. I worry what’s coming for desktop computing. Luckily weve been well served by historically open PC standards. I’m glad that repair & ownership advocates are speaking out against abuses…but often the world doesn’t listen; average people are sheep and governments are vulnerable to corruption.
FYI, the horses started escaping when Nintendo restricted the NES to their own games with the 10NES lockout chip, followed by carriers locking phones from sideloading jar (Java) apps (Sony Ericsson phones were like that, the carrier-branded variants couldn’t sideload jar apps but the carrier-unbranded ones could).
Videogames were and are where anti-consumer and anti-competitive behaviors are tried first because it’s the place where regulators tend not to look.
We are just slowly receiving the proceeds now.
Regulators want to ban general purpose computing in order to implement digital ID (aka “age verification”). The US government worked on that since the 90s and when people found out they just told Big Tech to work on that in secret and roll it out very slowly under everyone’s noses. I suspect that the “age verification” nonsense was planned ever since the 90s but that they were waiting for the tech, the infrastructure and the psyops to catch up.
General purpose computers will likely be banned from the Internet and all public networks eventually so there will be little demand for them.
Of course that Google will eventually ban all unsigned apps. I don’t think they will restrict the content of apps, but governments will compel Google to ban any app they don’t like.
Alfman,
Chrome OS already solved this (among other things). You could install a custom OS, including the open source version of Chromium OS (irony!) for unsupported devices. (Or run full Linux VMs that could even do gaming with Steam or run vscode for development with USB access, etc)
I’m not to sure what to make about this Googlebook (powered by™ Android).. A regression all around.
(Once again, what will they do for the 10 year support contracts they already sold to enterprises and schools)?
sukru,
I used to assume that too, I’m afraid this are wrong and I only learned it after getting a hand me down chromebook. I tried everything I could to get it to run an alt distro for hours. I even purchased a USB programming cable, but it wasn’t possible without an exploit. Some models are jailbroken, but many aren’t. Unless you are talking strictly about running a guest OS in a VM, you may be out of look trying to switch the host OS. It’s not supported and it’s actively blocked.
Alfman,
https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html
It looks like many devices require removing a hardware RW switch:
https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/images/wp/c720_c740_wp.png
Which is a screw.
If you still have it, maybe you can give it another try
I actually saw that same list, but it wasn’t on the list unfortunately. I don’t know if you noticed, but your list is comprised of x86 chromebooks. If by random chance I had gotten an x86 model, I might never have experienced these restrictions. But as luck would have it I got an ARM model, which dramatically increases the chance I was going to fail.
You may not believe me, so I’m attaching Gemini’s take so you know it’s true 🙂
Indeed, I could enter “developer mode”. But even then there were two major issues:
1) it was completely insecure for which I have to seriously fault google, just shameful.
2) it still wasn’t able to match the flexibility and openness of a normal linux distro. It was still too locked down.
Alfman,
Ah ARM ones should not have existed. But I get your pain
(I think we have discussed many times how x86 is a much more open ecosystem, and ARM is pretty much entirely locked down due to boot loader and closed drivers)
sukru,
What you’re describing is the problem Google is solving by killing ChromeOS. From their perspective, your freedom is a problem to solve.
There’s no world where ChromeOS just had actual technically unsolvable problems, and your freedom disappearing in its replacement was just an oopsie
Huh? Google Pixel devices are among the few Android devices with an unlockable bootloader, which lets you install a custom OS (either de-Googled Android or your own completely custom OS).
You see, Google doesn’t care whether you use your Google Pixel device (made by a minor loss-making division within Google that is Google’s hardware department) to run an alternative OS, what they care is that you don’t run Play Store apps on de-Googled Android. It’s why the proprietary Play Services APIs are constantly growing in number.
kurkosdr,
Sure, but when you follow the trends things aren’t going in the right direction, every year google keeps putting more obstacles in the way.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-not-killing-aosp-3566882/
We only loose a little bit at a time. People may downplay it since it’s happening slowly, however ignoring it isn’t wise because long term this is exactly how rights are lost. I for one am not optimistic that the voices calling for openness are being listened to within google. Perhaps it’s unreasonable for me to expect better of profit driven corporations. Still, even if it’s a little bit at a time, it’s a huge problem for society when freedoms are continuously chipped away. What makes this so much worse is the apple/google duopoly.
The link you provided has nothing to do with hardware. Again, all Pixels have unlockable bootloaders so you can install the OS of your choice.
kurkosdr,
I must disagree; AOSP not officially supporting google’s hardware is a significant regression.
Anyway I never denied that pixels have an unlockable bootloader. In fact I own one to try grapheneos. But that doesn’t refute the point I’m trying to get across: android has become a less open platform over time. Android keeps regressing compared to the open android of yesteryear. They take away one small thing here and another small thing there….you might dismiss the significance of any one change but looking at the overall trends these changes accumulate and make clear google don’t see android as an open platform anymore. They’re not even signaling that they wont continue to chip away and make android worse in the future.
I’m holding out for Magenta.
I am still excited about Google bringing Android to laptops and desktops, I have a particular fondness for OSes that don’t allow installers to run arbitrary post-install scripts as root/admin. And for OSes that don’t allow apps to demand root to run.
Yes, that’s right Desktop Linux fans, every single piece of Windows spyware, adware, and generally badware is portable to your favorite distro, the authors of such filth just can’t be bothered to port it for a 3%er OS.
Of course, Google will keep some APIs proprietary to Play Services, but we’ll still get a lot of AOSP code for making de-Google Android on desktops and laptops happen.
Well, enjoy… I miss when software was useful because it was allowed to link into other software, versus our “secure” future where nothing can do anything interesting because it’s sandboxed from everything else, and the only things that can make use of your data is the dishonest apps people paid to harvest you with.
A wonderfully secure, open platform, once you click the implied “I am a criminal” box and wait your three days to think about whether you really want to be a criminal before you’re granted your right to denial of the ability to do basic things like banking because they require those “few” proprietary APIs
I will try to be optimistic: There is a chance that Googlebooks will mean more desktop-optimised productivity applications for Android, e.g. “full” versions of Photoshop or MS Office for Android, similar to the ones for Windows and macOS. And if that happens you could theoretically run them on GNU/Linux using e.g. waydroid. So you can finally have these killer apps running on a Linux desktop and without the bugginess of Wine.
I suspect Googlebooks will eventually be abandoned, especially if significantly lower-priced Chromebooks continue to be sold alongside them. I have a £171 2-in-1 Chromebook that can already seamlessly run Android and Linux apps inside ChromeOS, so I’m really struggling to see what a Googlebook costing 4-6 times as much gives me that’s worth such a massive price hike.