Google announced the platform at The Android Show on YouTube, where it also detailed the new features coming to Android 17 and Gemini Intelligence (you can read more about it here). Google is intentionally not sharing the name of the operating system yet (internally it was codenamed Aluminum OS); Googlebooks is a platform, and Dell, Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo have all signed up to produce Googlebooks later this fall.
The company says it will share more details later this year, but I spoke to Alexander Kusher, Google’s senior director of Android tablets and laptops, to find out more. Kushner says there’s a huge amount of innovation in the Android ecosystem at the moment and it translates really well to laptops.
“You want to take advantage of the fact that this ecosystem is innovating so rapidly that you make sure that laptops are on top of that innovation wave – building on top of Android technologies makes it so easy for us,” he says.
Until now, when Google introduces a new set of features for Android or its Gemini Assistant, it often also announces some of those capabilities for other platforms, such as Wear OS smartwatches, Android Auto or Google Home. Chromebooks were hardly part of that picture because they were developed on a different technology stack and had their own development cycles. However, as with Googlebooks, you can expect to see new features pop up on Android that are available on Googlebooks laptops, where it makes sense.
Case in point: create a widget. This is a new generative AI feature coming to Android 17, which allows users to create their own widgets by talking naturally with Gemini. If you’re traveling you can ask it to create a widget that shows the day’s exchange rates, or a custom weather widget that also shows wind speed. This facility will be available Too Be available on Googlebooks.
But the main feature Google is teasing is the cursor, which the company calls the “magic pointer” on the Googlebook. Built with Google’s DeepMind team, it allows you to move your cursor while hovering over an app or image to get relevant suggestions. For example, you can hover the cursor over a date in an email, and Gemini will suggest setting up a calendar event. Or select two pictures in the Files app, shake, and Gemini will ask you if you want to merge them.
courtesy of google
The Play Store is where you’ll be able to access all your apps. But you might wonder how Google is overcoming the classic Chromebook limitation: In ChromeOS, you can’t download desktop-grade apps like Windows or macOS — you can only install Android apps from the Play Store or use web apps. This is a deal-breaker for those who rely on specific apps that may not have as powerful as a web client or Android app.
The answer is adaptive apps. Google has been encouraging app developers to build apps for screen sizes for the past few years, and now it means encouraging app makers to create desktop versions of their Android apps for Googlebooks. But Kusher says things will be different from the “disrupted” Android app experience on Chromebooks, which were originally built for the web-first era.
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