Two days ago, on September 24th, Android marked an important milestone: it is now 8 years since the first version of the operating system went live. Keenly taking note of the dates and quick to remind the world what that meant was none other than the Android boss himself.
Hiroshi Lockheimer, the Senior Vice President in charge of Android, Chrome OS and Google Play at Google took to Twitter to speak of how memorable the company’s upcoming October 4th event will be that, like the release of the first version of Android, we’ll still be remembering it 8 years from now.
We announced the 1st version of Android 8 years ago today. I have a feeling 8 years from now we'll be talking about Oct 4, 2016.
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) September 24, 2016
Hmm, so what could that be?
Surely, it’s not just the Pixel smartphones that we expect to see next week that we’ll live to remember. Maybe they’ll matter a lot since it will be the first time that Google will be explicitly going all out to drum up support for its own phones but there must be something else, right?
Maybe.
Some digging by 9to5Google unearthed interesting findings. Google recently started allowing Android apps to run on Chrome OS, its other operating system that runs on Chromebooks. But that isn’t the long term play that Google has in mind if reports going as far back as one year ago are to be believed. The memorable thing that the Android boss may have been hinting at in his tweet may be a merger of Chrome OS and Android. Well, we can all remember how he vigorously fought rumours of Chrome OS folding last year.
The project is reportedly known as Andromeda internally at Google, after one of the most expansive Galaxies in the universe.
While an introduction at the October 4th event is likely, the new hybrid operating system is not expected to be ready to hit the market until later next year.
Additional info: AndroidPolice
