Almost exactly 15 years since Google introduced Chromebooks and ChromeOS—which ushered a wave of cheap, functional, web-based laptops that would come to dominate the US education market—the company has announced a new laptop platform called Googlebook. It’s built around artificial intelligence and Android, and while it isn’t replacing Chromebooks, it could give the company a more meaningful foothold in the premium computer market.
Google announced the platform on The Android Show on YouTube, where it also detailed new features coming in Android 17 and Gemini Intelligence (you can read more about that here). Google is purposefully not sharing the operating system’s name yet (it was codenamed Aluminium OS internally); Googlebook is the platform, and Dell, Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo have all signed up to produce Googlebooks coming later this fall.
The company says it will share more information later this year, but I spoke with Alexander Kuscher, senior director at Google leading Android tablets and laptops, to glean more details. Kuscher says there’s an immense amount of innovation in the Android ecosystem right now, and it translates really well into laptops.
“You want to take advantage of the fact that this ecosystem is innovating so fast that you make sure that laptops are at the tip of that innovation wave—building on top of Android technologies makes that so much easier for us,” he says.
Until now, when Google rolls out a new set of features for Android or its Gemini assistant, it often also announces some of those capabilities for other platforms, like Wear OS smartwatches, Android Auto, or Google Home. Chromebooks were rarely part of that picture because they were developed on a different tech stack and had their own development cycles. However, with Googlebooks, you can expect to see new features that pop up on Android available on a Googlebook laptop, where it makes sense.
Case in point: Create a Widget. This is a new generative AI feature coming in Android 17, allowing users to generate their own widget by speaking naturally with Gemini. You can ask it to make a widget that shows the day’s exchange rate if you’re traveling, or a custom weather widget that also shows wind speed. This feature will also be available on Googlebooks.
But the highlight feature Google is teasing at the gate is the cursor, which the company calls the “Magic Pointer” on a Googlebook. Built with Google’s DeepMind team, wiggle your cursor while hovering over an app or image to get contextual suggestions. For example, you can wiggle the cursor at a date in an email, and Gemini will suggest setting up a calendar event. Or select two pictures in the Files app, wiggle, and Gemini will ask if you want to merge them.
Courtesy of Google
The Play Store is where you’ll access all of your apps. But you might wonder how Google is getting around the classic Chromebook limitation: In ChromeOS, you can’t download desktop-grade apps like on Windows or macOS—you can only install Android apps from the Play Store or use web apps. That’s a deal-breaker for people who rely on specific apps that may not have as powerful a web client or Android app.
The answer is adaptive apps. Google has been encouraging app developers to make apps react to the size of the screen for a few years now, and that now translates to encouraging app makers to make desktop versions of their Android apps for Googlebooks. But Kuscher says things will be different from the “constrained” Android app experience on Chromebooks, which were originally built for a web-first era.
