Aluminum OS appearance leaked. It will connect Chrome OS and Android

Google has been working on combining ChromeOS and Android for a long time, although the effects of this work are not very visible. The ultimate goal is one system on both smartphones and computers. It is codenamed Aluminum OS, although it is worth remembering that the final product may have a completely different name. Especially since giving up the name Android could be a huge image mistake.

Aluminum OS

Photo: 9to5Google

But how did the information leak? Well, completely… by accident. A screenshot of this system’s error report has appeared in the Chromium Issue Tracker. And although it has already been hidden, 9To5Google managed to take a screenshot from which we can learn a lot about the new system, which I will compare to Chrome OS.

And so the date, time, battery, and connectivity disappeared from the bottom bar and moved to the top one. Thus, it is more like the layout of an Android tablet or… MacOS. The Chrome browser deserves special attention: just like ChromeOS, it supports extensions and allows you to work in windowed mode.

Data about the hardware the device runs on is also worth attention. Well, it is HP Elite Dragonfly, a Chromebook from 2022. So there is a chance that at least some Chromebooks will be updated to Aluminum OS. Which would make sense, because abandoning the entire platform and switching to another system could backfire for Google. A good example is Windows Phone 7, which was abandoned in favor of Windows Phone 8 / Windows 10 mobile, without the possibility of hardware updates, which undermined Microsoft’s position in the smartphone market. However, these are just speculations and further developments should be monitored.