Google exec sets Android OS for PCs plans in motion

The launch of an Android OS on PCs will definitely happen, and it will be as early as next year, according to a senior Google executive.

Speaking at the Snapdragon Summit 2025 in Maui, Hawaii on Wednesday, Sameer Samat, president of the Android Ecosystem at Google, said, “if you think about the laptop form factor, we’ve had ChromeOS for a long time, and we’re super committed to that platform, and it’s been really successful for us.” Google has learned a lot from it as well, he observed, and from its successful Android tablets, which are becoming what he described as “productivity machines.”

The opportunity that Google sees, he said, is to “accelerate all the AI advancement that we’re doing on Android and bring that to the laptop form factor as rapidly as possible, and also have the laptop and the rest of the Android ecosystem work seamlessly together. What we’re doing is basically taking the ChromeOS experience and we’re re-baselining the technology underneath it on Android.”

Brian Jackson, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “Google’s decision to merge Android and ChromeOS isn’t surprising, and is a development that analysts have speculated on for years. Perhaps it’s only surprising that it’s coming this late, but the trajectory to unify both the user experience and the developer experience for mobile and PC form factors makes sense. It comes at a time when Qualcomm is leaning into its neural processing unit (NPU) architecture, which excels at inference AI. “

Jackson added, “Google is looking to leverage AI more often on Android and wants a low-latency, secure experience for some of these functions, so optimizing inference on the device makes sense.”

The initial market that Android for PC will impact, he said, is the same market segment that deploys Chromebooks today: “The primary enterprise segment that comes to mind is the education sector, where Chromebooks have been the platform of choice for devices issued by schools to their students since the pandemic sent K-12 into a remote learning mode.”

There are, he said, “other examples too, but basically, enterprises look to Chromebooks when they want to cater to a consumer-like mass user segment. The advantages of the platform include its simplicity in device management, user experience, and relative unit cost per device.”  

Android PCs ‘not yet governance ready’

 Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, said that Google’s announcement “marks its boldest attempt yet to challenge the Windows–macOS duopoly. From our vantage point, the significance for enterprises is less about replacing entrenched estates and more about the prospect of fresh negotiating leverage.”

CIOs, he added, are “wary of lock-in and escalating licensing costs; 61% of them in the Greyhound CIO Pulse 2025 highlight security and compliance as their top driver for endpoints, while 54% cite governance and freedom from lock-in as equally decisive. Android PCs will not be judged on novelty. They will be judged on whether they can withstand enterprise governance.”

CIOs urged to be pragmatic

Android PCs should be viewed as a convergence of ChromeOS’s governance model and Android’s vast app ecosystem, he said. “This makes them intriguing, but not yet enterprise ready. CIOs we speak with are quick to recall Google’s mixed record of sustaining long-term commitments, and that hesitation is likely to linger until the company publishes a clearer roadmap. The larger concern is governance.”

Gogia added, “if a CIO were to ask us today whether to evaluate Android PCs, our counsel would be pragmatic: test them, but do so under guardrails. The sensible starting point is to bind pilots to roles where compliance hurdles are lighter — such as education, frontline retail, or hybrid worker cohorts. These scenarios allow organisations to validate the obvious attractions: lower TCO, long battery life, and continuity with Android apps already in use.”

The news from Google, ironically, comes at a time when, aside from some users in the EU who are being spared, businesses running Windows 10 will no longer receive free software updates, technical assistance, or security updates from Microsoft after October 14.

Clearly, said Jackson, “Android for PC isn’t going to ‘save’ enterprises that haven’t upgraded their Windows 10 systems to Windows 11 yet. But that segment isn’t the realistic target for this OS for the most part. This isn’t something that enterprises are going to look at as a replacement for Windows. Rather, it’s a new option for those who need to issue managed devices at scale.”

For the education sector and others in similar positions, he said, “the question now becomes, what’s the road map to migrate my fleet of devices? They will need to consider whether they should purchase the new Android for PC devices and if that will integrate smoothly into their device management approach.”

And, said Jackson, “they’ll need to start considering when the end of support/end of life date for their current Chromebook devices will hit. Are they going to get a clear path to upgrade that fleet from Google? Or will they need to refresh their hardware to keep pace?”