> Ew. ChromeOS was always a beautiful contrast to Android, running mainline kernels instead of Android's hacked up mess.
This is at least partly because the two are distributed very differently, with Chrome OS on a much shorter leash than Android, even with Play services.
With Chrome OS devices Google can push updates to any device whenever they want, whereas with Android it was often up to the manufacturer, or even carrier, which many Googlers (not all) considered to be a mistake.
But this is also the Chrome OS achilles heel because support for esoteric third party hardware blocks is the Android killer feature and now more important than ever.
I tend to not believe that it's just that, because even Google's own phones have never run mainline kernels outside of experiments that never actually shipped to end users.
This is at least partly because the two are distributed very differently, with Chrome OS on a much shorter leash than Android, even with Play services.
With Chrome OS devices Google can push updates to any device whenever they want, whereas with Android it was often up to the manufacturer, or even carrier, which many Googlers (not all) considered to be a mistake.
But this is also the Chrome OS achilles heel because support for esoteric third party hardware blocks is the Android killer feature and now more important than ever.