Should Android and Chrome OS Share the Same Platform?--Not

by Sam Dean - Oct. 27, 2010Comments (1)

Lately, especially as news has arrived about the Android Market reaching 100,000 apps and Google's Chrome OS becoming imminent, there have been more and more pundits proclaiming that Android and Chrome OS should share the same platform. There are developers referring to them as "fragmented" platforms, and they claim that since they are both aimed at mobile users, application developers should be able to write once for both operating systems. That's malarkey, and ignores aspects of open source that are most powerful.

The biggest problem with the caterwaulers claiming that they should be able to develop once for Android and Chrome OS is that they don't understand the large differences between the two platforms. This post we did when Chrome OS was first announced breaks down the many ways in which it is very different from any operating system seen before. It's intentionally different. It has a unique security model, is aimed only at netbook users initially, and asks users to rely exclusively on applications and data that reside in the cloud.

Android is a mobile OS aimed at smartphones, smart TVs, set-top boxes and an increasing number of hardware platforms. But it's an entirely different animal from Chrome OS, and is not intended as a desktop computing OS. Google has been careful to differentiate between Android and Chrome OS from the beginning.

In a blog post cited by ZDNet, Google's open source and compatibility program manager, Dan Morrill, said:

"Stories on 'fragmentation' are dramatic and they drive traffic to pundits' blogs, but they have little to do with reality. Fragmentation is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers."

'Nuff said. Fragmentation can be a problem when it is overdone, but there is hardly any extremism in Google having two open source mobile operating system aimed at different markets.