If you’re familiar with ChromeOS and look at the Googlebook interface, it won’t be immediately obvious that the platforms are completely different. You’ll find the same app dock at the bottom of the screen; the Chrome browser should work just as well here as elsewhere, and you can install Android apps from the Play Store to expand your computer’s capabilities. The difference lies in what’s happening underneath. Android powers the system, although Google emphasizes that, for developers, an isolated Linux environment with a full terminal is also part of the operating system. The platform still includes the same Titan hardware security chip and built-in malware protection that you’ll find on Chromebooks.
You may be wondering why it’s important that Google now uses Android as the basis for Googlebooks. It all goes back to the proposition put forward by Samat: a laptop tightly connected to your Android phone. While Chrome OS has a number of features for connecting your phone and laptop, Googlebooks takes it a step further (and makes those connections faster). Google and its developer community also share a code base, which should simplify development for Google Books and Android phones.
Google has shown many examples of this tighter integration, starting with the process of connecting to a new Googlebook. You’ve always used a Google account to sign in to a Chromebook, but now signing in can pull in data like saved passwords, Wi-Fi networks, message history, and more.
Things get more interesting once you’re connected. The “Continue” feature easily transfers apps from your phone to a Google Book, keeping everything as it was. Google demonstrated this feature with the cloud-based music creation app BandLab: a project with several tracks running on an Android phone was almost instantly transmitted to a nearby Googlebook with the same tracks intact. If you hold your Android phone close to a Google Book you’re signed in to, a small app suggestion simply appears in the dock; one click which launches the application.
Google also showed this with Gmail, which was smart enough to open the Googlebook’s web interface even though it came from the phone’s Android app. For starters, Google says its own apps will know when to push an Android app to the web, and third-party apps should be able to do so in the future.
Google
Your phone will also appear in the new Files app on Googlebooks. On the left side of the file browser, you’ll find a familiar interface showing your laptop, Google Drive, and other folders you might pin. Your Android phone also appears here, so you can easily access everything on its internal storage and move it to your laptop.
Another integration point is streaming apps from your Android phone to a Google Book. There’s an icon in the dock that simply pulls out your app drawer from your phone so you can then choose and launch whatever you want on your Googlebook. The Mac and iPhone have something similar with full mirroring of your phone, but in this case your phone “casts” the app to your Googlebook. I can’t say yet what the “best” solution is, but this looks like the tightest integration between an Android phone and laptop we’ve seen so far.
That said, Microsoft has long created a “Link to Windows” app that offers plenty of phone mirroring features – and with over a billion downloads on the Play Store, it’s not exactly a niche tool. I have no doubt that Google’s integration will be more robust and functional, but will that be enough to convince someone to leave behind a perfectly functional Windows computer?
App streaming from Android to Chromebooks also exists and works perfectly, so I can’t call this feature a differentiator from what’s already available. Of course, it should be easier for Google to iterate and implement such features since Googlebooks and Android phones will run on a much closer code base, but what really matters are the end-user improvements.
