This is a mistake. Not only does it potentially irreparably destroy ChromeOS' strong security model, by trying to force two different platforms into one, but this is going to be a S L O W process to bring Android apps on ChromeOS, making the whole idea almost useless. If you thought Android finally getting "tablet apps" was slow, this will be much worse. Just look at them here announcing a whopping number of four apps. That has got to be the weakest "platform" launch in recent years. Even for Honeycomb they had like 30 apps at launch.

What Google should be doing (despite the strong internal conflict against this - Android is run by the guy who invented ChromeOS after all) is fitting Android on PC's.

Now hear me out. I don't want the current Android to be put on PC's. That's obviously a bad idea, and it's been tried before and it doesn't work. Why? Because it's a terrible user experience having a phone (or even tablet) UI on a laptop. Nobody really wants to use Android-x86 project on their laptops, either.

But here's what Google can do. It can turn it into another "Android Wear" or "Android TV", but for PC's. What that means is that it takes the Android core, and all the Android compatibility, and then highly optimizes it for that usage mode.

Doing this will be surprisingly easy for Google, and about an order of magnitude easier than putting Android apps on ChromeOS. What they need is 3 things:

1) a taskbar - don't laugh. It worked for ChromeOS. ChromeOS really started being seen as a potentially good alternative for Windows when it got a taskbar, despite it having only shortcuts to web apps. But it helps greatly with usability

2) multi-windows - another thing that ChromeOS got later on. Initially it was kind of full-screen/multi-desktop, which wasn't that great of an experience.

3) Android apps that scale nicely to 13" screens or larger. This is actually already underway since they announced the whole material design stuff together with the Polymer library for web apps (which guess what - work on 13"+ PC's!) - so they have already "fixed" this problem for Android PCs, even if somewhat unintentionally. In fact, they are already doing that with these Android apps inside ChromeOS. Look at the picture they're using in the blog post. The app could look exactly the same way on an "Android PC". So why not do the same thing on Android, where those apps came from? This would have the advantage of getting virtually all the apps on Android PC's from day one of "Android PC" mode.

So the first two would solve the "OS optimization" problem, for larger screens, while the last one would solve the problem of the Android apps being optimized for larger screens. Again, this should be much easier than doing it on top of ChromeOS.

Do I expect Google to do this anytime soon? No it won't. Instead it will waste 2 years not doing this, while Apple puts iOS on a laptop, with advanced multi-tasking, a laptop that I expect to be much more successful than any Mac OS laptop, because it will be cheaper, and because an order of magnitude more people know iOS now, than Mac OS, so an iOS laptop has a much wider reach. After 2 years, they'll think "gee, maybe we should do that, too", but by then they will already be behind.

Android, with its 1 billion user base and still rapidly growing is also by far a bigger threat to Windows on the desktop than ChromeOS. People in many countries, especially emerging ones, are already familiar with Android, and have been using it as their "first OS". It's such a shame Google isn't going to take advantage of this, to push people to Android laptops. Oh well, they can't say I didn't try. Failing to bring Android on PCs will be on them.