Google is combining Android and Chrome OS for 2017 say insiders

Company was waiting to see which approach won, suggest reports

Google has had long-term plans to fold Android and Chrome OS into the same operating system, and those plans are close to fruition, with a proposed completion date of 2017, so the Wall Street Journal reports after speaking to "people familiar with the matter".

The Google insiders revealed that company engineers have been working for around two years to combine Android and Chrome OS into a single platform, but may have been hedging their bets in order to gain a clear idea of exactly how Google's approach to operating systems would play out in terms of numbers of users.

Android now powers over 80 per cent of smartphones across the world, with Chrome inside only around three per cent of PCs (mainly Chromebook products, which are used mainly in the education sector).

While Android, in effect, apes Apple's iOS model by relying on plugging apps into a main software environment, Chrome OS attempted to bring a more web-based functionality to the fore when designing system software.

With notions of running entirely in the cloud, the point of Chrome was to access all software through a web browser environment as opposed to relying on locally installed applications for functionality.

Effectively, the Chrome approach has always hobbled Google's hold on the laptop market, with the use case for Chromebooks having to be reduced to office or campus-bound work. Computing knows of few CIOs who have deployed Chromebooks for day-to-day productivity tasks.

The possibility of the Android approach proliferating beyond phones and tablets and onto laptops is interesting. The recently announced Google Pixel C is doing this, and even Apple seems to have finally realised that an app-based mobile OS can go all in with productivity with the announcement of the iPad Pro - though both of these machines will have to prove themselves in the field.

If Google can keep the high points of the Chrome OS environment running inside the Chrome browser, it may not even have to truly sacrifice the functionality on offer from either operating system.