Bad news: Google confirmed that it has no concrete intention of officially injecting ChromeOS into its Pixel devices.
The news follows an earlier leak showing a Pixel smartphone and a tablet running on ChromeOS. The leaked videos were truly fascinating, with the small-screen devices working like mini Chromebooks. It started speculations that the search giant could introduce this to its Pixel devices soon, but the company has dismissed the idea.
In a recent episode of the Android Faithful podcast (via 9To5Google), Google Vice President of Engineering and Android Platform Dave Burke revealed that the capability is just part of Google’s demo for a new tech.
“The reason we care about this a lot is that, historically, in Android, for secure computing, you’d use something like Trust Zone, which is a special enclave, but it’s not as safe as it could be,” Burke shared. “We think virtual machines are a much cleaner, safer way to have compartmentalized, secure code. Over time, you’ll see us evacuating code from Trust Zone into virtual machines. We want to make virtual machines work really well, make them light and capable. The Android 15 feature that we added was the ability to have graphical operating systems be hosted in a virtual machine with GPU acceleration.
“’We need to do a demo. What would be really cool? Let’s put ChromeOS in there. That’d be really funny. Could that really work?’ And it works. That’s as far as it went. It’s a tech demo to show the tech. What we’re excited about is virtualization, and it was just a way of showing it.”
