A recent report from The Wall Street Journal claimed that Chrome OS and Android are merging. The Journal said that Chrome OS would be "folded into" Android—a move that would have big implications for both OSes.

There have been a lot of follow-up reports from all over the Internet, so before we get all speculative, let's round up what's out there. The Wall Street Journal had the initial report, saying that Chrome OS would be "folded into" Android. The project has been underway for "roughly two years," with release planned for "2017" and an "early version" that would be shown off "early next year."

The report called the combined OS "the new version of Android" and said that Chromebooks would get a new, yet-to-be-determined name. The WSJ noted that "Chrome OS will remain as an open source operating system" and engineers would "continue maintaining it," but that Google's "focus" would be on "extending Android to run on laptops."

"There’s a ton of momentum for Chromebooks and we are very committed to Chrome OS. I just bought two for my kids for schoolwork!" Hiroshi Lockheimer, the new senior vice president of Android and Chrome OS, said shortly after the report was published.

He later wrote in a blog post for the Official Chrome Blog: "While we’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there's no plan to phase out Chrome OS."

There was also a flurry of follow-up reports from other publications, citing sources of their own. TechCrunch reported, "What we do know is that neither operating system is being “killed off," referring to Android and Chrome OS. Re/Code wrote, "Starting next year, the company will work with partners to build personal computers that run on Android, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The Chrome browser and operating systems aren’t disappearing—PC makers that produce Chromebooks will still be able to use Chrome. But they will now have the choice of Android." Business Insider quoted a source as saying, "There is a scenario in which we move forward and the likelihood is there is still Chrome OS and Android and there could be a third project that combines the best of both."

Sundar Pichai, the new CEO of Google under Larry Page's Alphabet, even dropped a hint about Chrome OS and Android's future during Google's last earnings call. Pichai said that "mobile as a computing paradigm is eventually going to blend with what we think of as desktop today."

The company is already playing with the idea of Android on more laptop-like devices—so far everything in the Pixel hardware family has run Chrome OS. But the latest device, Pixel C, runs Android.

Google has toyed with the idea of merging Chrome OS and Android in the past, only it used Chrome OS as the base, instead of Android. This is the "App Runtime for Chrome (ARC)" which ran Android apps on Chrome OS. The last major update we saw for this project was in April, which added some support for Google Play Services. This made it possible for developers to bring their apps over to Chrome OS, but, judging by the Chrome Web Store's "available for Android" section (which shows ARC apps and hand-ported apps), not many did. If the WSJ's reporting turns out to be true, it seems like Google may switch directions, changing from Chrome OS as a base to Android as a base.

What happens to Chrome OS?

It's hard to read too much into Lockheimer's statement when he says Google is "very committed" to Chrome OS and to expect "dozens of new Chromebooks in 2016." With the new OS not being out until 2017, any executive would have to publicly support the OS that exists today. Even if Chrome OS was being replaced as soon as this "hybrid" OS came out, publicly admitting that would be a financial disaster. Lockheimer came out and said only what he is obligated to say as an employee of Google.

The consensus of all the reports seems to be that Android will be extended to PCs, which would certainly be a blow to Chrome OS. Lockheimer and all the reports say Chrome OS won't be killed, but it would be old, which is almost as bad.

We imagine something like Microsoft keeping Windows 7 around during the era of Windows 8 and 8.1. The WSJ's report said that Chrome OS would continue to receive maintenance updates, which sounds a lot like how Windows 7 still sees security updates from Microsoft today—security bugs get patched, but no major development happens. It's not "killed" but it will eventually be phased out in favor of the new platform.

It's rare that a tech company completely kills an old platform when it has a new one, and we expect Chrome OS to slowly wind down while the new OS picks up. Google could keep both products alive, and as long as someone wants to use one of them, the company is happy. This would also be a lot safer since if the hybrid OS ends up being a huge commercial failure, it could easily switch back to the existing Android and Chrome OS lineup.

Is this a ground-up revamp of Android?

One interpretation of a hybrid Chrome and Android OS is that this will turn into a ground-up rewrite of Android. Every major operating system eventually has to blow everything up and start over at some point in its lifetime. We saw Microsoft do it with the consumer version of Windows, when it scrapped the Windows 9x codebase in favor of the more modern Windows NT kernel with Windows XP. With Mac OS X, Apple scrapped the OS 9 codebase and switched to a Unix-like operating system based on technology it pulled in from Steve Jobs' NeXT.

It's too limiting to just add new features on top of the existing codebase. Sometimes it's worth it to rewrite core parts of an OS to modernize it and abandon (or maybe virtualize) any legacy software that you break. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google's merging project has been underway for two years and won't be out until 2017. A revamp along the same lines of XP or OS X certainly seems possible for Google in that amount of time.

Many parts of Android are still negatively affected by decisions made for the 1.0 product, which, frankly, makes using Android as the base for a new OS seem like a bad idea. Right now every single device has to have a custom version of Android built specifically for it. For instance, you can't take an Android build for the Galaxy S6 and stick it on a Nexus 5X—it wouldn't boot and would probably brick your device.

This kind of device-dependent software makes it difficult to come up with a scalable update system, which is Android's biggest weakness today. The lack of a scalable update solution greatly hurts the security of your average Android phone, and it disappoints users as slow updates or abandoned devices prevent users from getting Android's latest features. Fixing Android's update situation would definitely take a group-up rewrite.

When compared to Chrome OS, sticking with Android almost seems backwards. While Android struggles with updates, Chrome OS has the problem figured out. Updates come directly from Google every six weeks (or more quickly, for critical security fixes). Updates are silently downloaded, and the old version is swapped out for the new version when Chrome OS reboots. Devices have a set End of Life date, and most of them are supported for around five years.

There is currently nothing like this for Android. If Google is going to use Android as a base for a new OS, it would be crazy not to take the time to fix core problems like this. It would be great if ARM defined a platform itself, with an analog to the PC platform's BIOS. ARM has done this for servers with the Server Base System Architecture (SBSA), where any operating system that targets SBSA can run on any SBSA system, just like the PC Platform's BIOS/UEFI system (Microsoft has more or less defined such a platform for Windows RT, Windows Phone, and now Windows 10 Mobile). Maybe Google's 2017 OS release is targeting a wider-released phone version of SBSA, but if not, Android has so much market share that Google could probably define its own basic abstraction layer, which the hardware ecosystem could target.