Android’s desktop interface leaks

Unless Google reorganizes and gets more focused, I'd say they are highly likely to repeat their mistakes.

IMHO both Apple and Google are missing a big opportunity here. Both are doing work to blur the lines between desktop and mobile. Both are targeting laptops, ar, phones, and tablets.

These are multiple modalities. Or they should be. But because the way both are structured, these are isolated islands with some interoperability but the whole experience is very device centric.

What's nicer is when you have multiple devices and a clean handover between them. You basically sign in and all your apps and data are there. All the open apps have the same state. They just adapt to the formfactor.

Apple has been taking babysteps here but it's still hopelessly compartmentalizing the market. So switching between devices is a lot of setup and install friction.

And for Google, they've been banging the drum that everything is cloud based since forever. Yet they can't figure out a cross device UX that makes sense. It should be as simple as sign in and all your stuff is there. That was the vision with ChromeOS at some point but then they lost interest, got distracted by Fuchsia, went off and created Flutter and also forgot that Android was the thing that actually has an enormous amount of users and OEMs shipping it.

The trillion dollar opportunity here: if devices become like shoes, many people probably have more than one. Some people have many pairs of shoes for different occasions. But they have only one phone. Because switching between devices is painful. Adding another OS to the mix just kicks that can down the road. Multi device, multi modal access to your stuff is the key thing that they should be nailing. If e.g. Apple were to nail that, some people might have many different devices in different sizes and form factors. The main decision as to which one to use would be based on which is most appropriate for the context.

If you take something like that as the starting point, the logical conclusion is that Google should evolve Android to run on any type of device and make sure that everything plays nice together. Switching between your Android phone(s), tablet, TVs, car, AR/VR goggles, or laptops should not be hard. Devices running a version of Android exist in all those categories. But there's very little/no integration across these.

The Android system is such a pain to work with. I’m curious to see whether they actually fixed the fundamentals making it unappealing for general purpose computing or they just stuck Android onto Chromebooks (guessing the latter).

So just don't use windows? The only reason I use android to begin with is because the mobile centric distros I looked into didn't appear to be to the point I would want to daily drive them yet. If and when that changes I'll switch.

The only real issue is sourcing good mobile hardware that isn't locked down. At least for the time being the pixel line satisfies that.

What's the purpose of a native build if the windows build runs just as good, or even better?

They ensured that the devs need not worry about another build target that requires extensive QA. Maybe in the distant future we will get ubiquitous native builds, but honestly and again, who cares?

Proton and Wine means there is a single target now, instead of the fragmented mess that is Desktop Linux today.

This looks like it will help a lot of students and families who are on a budget. If you can just plug your phone into a screen you do not need to buy a separate laptop anymore. The browser extensions are the most important part because that is what makes a computer useful. I am glad to see they are thinking about this.