At Snapdragon Summit 2025, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon had an on-stage conversation with Google’s Rick Osterloh. The SVP of Platforms & Devices had more comments about desktop Android, with Qualcomm also working on it and “incredibly excited.”
In 2024, Google said ChromeOS would be built on Android going forward. An interview in July brought up how ChromeOS and Android are being merged into “a single platform.” Specifically, Google is “building the ChromeOS experience on top of Android underlying technology.”
Amon: What can you share about what we’re doing together for this new project at Google for personal computing?”
Osterloh: Our strategy overall is to bring really, really rich computing experiences to every category. We talked about Autos, we talked about XR, we talked smartphones, of course. In the past, we’ve always had very different systems between what we are building on PCs and what we are building on smartphones.
Over the years, ChromeOS has gotten more Android, but that ability to run apps from the Play Store is due to a virtual machine approach rather than anything more native.
We’ve embarked on a project to combine that. We are building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems.
This is another way that we can leverage all of the great work we’re doing together on our AI stack, our full stack, bringing Gemini models, bringing the assistant, bringing all of our application and developer community into the PC domain.
Since last year, Google has been explicit how that “technical foundation” is Android. Specifically, this move would “accelerate the pace of AI innovation at the core of ChromeOS, simplify engineering efforts, and help different devices like phones and accessories work better together with Chromebooks.”
Osterloh ends on the following, with Android being explicitly named:
We are really excited about this, and I think this is another way in which Android is going to be able to serve everyone in every computing category.
The Qualcomm CEO closes by saying:
I’ve seen it. It’s incredible. I think it delivers on the vision of conversions in mobile and PC. And I can’t wait to have one.
Google’s work gives Qualcomm a new OS for its PC-class chips. Historically, only a few Chromebooks have been powered by Qualcomm CPUs, and none today are powered by the Oryon CPUs.
From what Google has said so far, it does seem that ChromeOS and Chromebooks remain, but there will be some new desktop Android-first offering. It remains to be seen when all this will be announced. Android 16’s desktop experience is focused on tablets, and connecting phones to external displays. We have yet to see what a dedicated device (possibly convertibles) looks like.
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