Last week, a report claimed that Google is working to fold Chrome OS into Android within the next year or two. Google didn’t have much to say about the rumor at the time, but the company broke its silence today.
Google today put up a blog post titled “Chrome OS is here to stay.” As you might’ve guessed from the title, Google says that while it’s been “working on ways to bring together the best” of Chrome OS and Android, it has “no plan to phase out Chrome OS.” The company goes on to drop a bunch of stats about how popular Chromebooks are in classrooms, the enterprise, and with the public, like the one that says that 30,000 new Chromebooks are activated in US classrooms every school day.
Google ends the blog post by teasing that we should keep an eye out for “dozens of new Chromebooks in 2016.”
That last little bit is interesting because, while rumors have suggested that Google might show its combined Chrome OS-Android operating system in early 2016, it likely won’t ship until 2017. So while Google might be committed to Chrome OS for the next year or so, it’s also possible that the company could be planning to merge Chrome OS into Android in 2017 while continuing to support the existing Chrome OS products. We’ll just have to wait and see.