The case for a full-circle Googlebook future

Put on your finest propeller-packin’ thinking caps, my fellow Android-appreciating animals — ’cause I’ve got a brain-bending bit of big-picture thinking about the future of Android and everything around it.

This pondering comes out of my ongoing time living with one of Google’s new Googlebook laptops — the beautifully built Lenovo Googlebook (provided to me as a short-term loaner for editorial assessment). Right now, the Googlebook experience itself is best summed up as an awkward start with plenty of potential. Android in a laptop environment just comes with an awful lot of asterisks, especially when you’re trying to use such a system for serious work. In many ways, it feels like a step down from the more polished and productivity-optimized Chromebook setup it’s ultimately designed to replace.

But while working on a Googlebook and using it as your primary computer still seems like a bit of a square-peg situation, I’ve been struck by one area where the Googlebook OS software at the center of the experience feels almost shockingly natural.

And that’s led me down a rabbit hole of pondering about the bigger-picture implications of this operating system and how it could, at least in theory, one day affect the rest of the Android ecosystem.

Lemme explain.

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A Googlebook by any other name

So, at its core, Googlebook OS is essentially Android — right? The software that powers Googlebooks is a specialized version of Android 17 designed to have some ChromeOS-like elements along with phone-connecting powers and a handful of feature additions that help it work better on a big screen.

And the more I use it, the more I keep coming back to a thought that I mentioned in passing in my initial Googlebook analysis — that this is what the Android tablet interface oughta be.

Think about it: Google has never really figured out how it wants an Android tablet to work — or if and how it even wants to promote and support the development of that not-quite-a-phone, not-quite-a-laptop form factor in the first place.

Early on, we saw a completely large-screen-optimized Android version called Honeycomb (a.k.a. Android 3.0 through 3.2), where Google gave us a dramatically reimagined interface designed to take full advantage of the tablet’s added screen space.

It wasn’t long, of course, before Google did its Google Thang™ and gave up on that idea — and that’s to say nothing of the even more ambitious Android tablet plan the company spent millions of dollars to develop and then never brought to fruition at all. By a certain point, it became obvious that Google was for all practical purposes giving up on Android tablets and that touch-oriented Chromebooks were effectively filling that role for informed buyers.

Fast-forward through a few other confusing short-lived pivots — the very brief return to tablet devotion with the ChromeOS-running Pixel Slate, the declaration of being done with tablets that followed, and the about-face and (once more) brief return to tablet devotion with the Pixel Tablet and its admirable but never fully realized and rapidly abandoned tablet-smart-display combo philosophy — and we’re back to a present now where Android tablets are mostly an afterthought, as far as Google and the underlying platform are concerned.

With all of that in mind, using a Googlebook is a bit of a revelation — when you think about the experience as less of a full-fledged laptop replacement and more of a potential future for a revamped Android tablet.

The Googlebook-Android tablet connection

Consider: In many ways, Googlebook OS picks up where Honeycomb left off 15 years ago — as far as the interface itself is concerned. It feels like a familiar Android environment, for anyone who’s used Android on a phone, but with some thoughtful touches that make it more sensible in that larger-screen setting. Everything from having the clock in the upper-left corner alongside a split-apart notification panel and Quick Settings area in the right to having the same desktop-style taskbar we’ve seen on recent Android foldables just feels right when you frame a Googlebook as a tablet and not, first and foremost, a work laptop.

Plain and simple, it’s Android — only optimized for a larger screen. And, thanks to its ChromeOS-inspired elements, it adds in the advantages of a less restrictive big-screen browser environment and smarter tools for interacting with your phone. The elements that feel awkward for a work laptop don’t matter as much in an Android tablet, which you’re more likely to use as a touch-centric supplement and companion to your workday computer and as a device where productivity is more of an occasional add-on as opposed to the primary purpose.

As a tablet interface, Googlebook OS gives you a souped-up version of the standard Android tablet setup that’d also be much more useful than a traditional tablet when you connect a keyboard. And without the expectation of it completely replacing your computer, it suddenly makes a lot of sense.

So riddle me this: With Android tablets being an afterthought now, anyway, what’s to stop Google from starting over — yes, again — and encouraging companies to create Googlebook tablets next?

It’d allow Google to rebrand and relaunch a category that’s always struggled to catch on and get past its not-so-exceptional early reputation. And for us, as users of these products, it’d give us some overdue options for a larger slate-like Android experience that’d work seamlessly with our phones, be pleasingly familiar and capable, and offer the unique advantage of having a mostly desktop-caliber browser for light work when such needs arise (with or without a keyboard connected) — all with the kind of timely and reliable software support promise any such product should provide.

And — oh, yes — there’s more.

Googlebook, Googlebook, everywhere

Here’s the real mind-blowing next-step possibility to consider: If we do one day have Googlebook tablets — and the Googlebook OS software at the heart of them continues to evolve and become a core focus for Google as time moves on — how much of a leap would it be from there to see things streamlined and reaching a point where we also have Googlebook phones?

It brings me back, fittingly enough, to a question I posed over a decade ago — back when Android and ChromeOS were coming ever-closer together and it looked like that was the path Google was pursuing.

Consider this now, with the notion of Googlebook OS in the mix in place of ChromeOS:

If all Android apps can eventually run on ChromeOS — and if ChromeOS evolves to look more like Android while web apps and Android apps grow increasingly similar in design — would you notice the difference between a phone running Android and a phone running Chrome?

The specific platforms and concepts at the center of this have shifted since we last thought this through in 2015, but the idea itself is the same.

And, once more, there’s no better way to end this contemplation than by saying:

Welcome to the Matrix, my friends. Whoaaa. 

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