Android’s Reentry Into Tablets
Android 3.0 Honeycomb. It was Google’s first entry into the tablet world and remains the most infamous Android release out of all of them. It was a commercial failure in part because of the Google’s confusing policies, poor guidelines, and Honeycomb’s propriety nature limited it’s reach. But it was a step in the direction in terms of the operating system’s overall evolution. A lot of what we get from Android today originates from Honeycomb, such as the software buttons and Material Design could be traced back to Holo UI.
I was not a smartphone user at first. I began with the iPod Touch that my dad gave me and later iPad. Mostly because the thought of giving a kid or teen a smartphone wasn’t really a thing. Admittedly, I thought of the iPhone as a PDA with a phone and I still stand by that statement with all smartphones. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Despite selling like hotcakes, iOS on iPad was so extremely limited that it made doing anything productive a pain and challenge because everything we take for granted today wasn’t there. And while Android didn’t have the ecosystem it has today, it did have the functionality. So I switched.
But pure Android tablets have long since gone extinct since the Nexus program ended. Variants based on forks, such as Amazon (Kindle) Fire, remain the last remints of them. The iPad has gone without proper competition since then. Only the Fire family of tablets remains the most popular Android tablet on the market but it barely makes a dent in iPad’s market share.
Convergence
The thing about creating a tablet operating system out of a smartphone one is that it allows existing phone applications to have expandable tablet variants to the point that you basically wind up reinventing the desktop. And the iPad showed it was possible to do just that.
Because of stricter polices on Google Play (than Android Store) and Honeycomb had not yet existed, Android OEMs began to tinker with convergence. Phone apps would move to a custom desktop that resembled macOS or Windows, such as the Motorola Atrix, and function as if it were on a desktop. Google Play was only allowed on phones prior to ICS. I guess this was the most logical workaround.
Despite the potential, all were failures without proper tablet interface and APIs. But Google was paying attention and added support for plenty of desktop features since ICS, but an official desktop mode never amounted to anything more than something experiential in Android N.
Chrome OS
Chrome OS is an interesting beast. Explaining it in full would require another article on it’s own. I’ll just talk about the parts that matter the most. Chrome OS started out with browser itself existing in a single full screen window that evolved to getting into getting something more akin traditional desktop by 2012. Though Frederic Lardinois from TechCrunch claims it was Google admitting defeat, it had more to do with scaling issues at higher resolutions when they were working with OEMs to develop the Chromebox that were introduced the same year.
In 2011, Steven Levy pointed out Chrome OS’ potential relationship to Android. Okay, quick pause: the 2012 update added a application launcher that was very similar to macOS’ Launchpad, which itself derived from iOS, but he made this claim one year prior! Anyway, Sergey Brin eventually addressed the issue by saying the two operating systems would eventually converge. By 2013 the senior VP of Chrome OS was put in charge of Android. Though speculation from Wall Street Journal suggested that the two codebases would merge, what actually happened was Chrome OS gradually gained Android app support through containerization.
Now we’re getting 2-in-1 Chromebooks with some getting stylus support, based on the new USI specification, with all 2020 or newer models getting eight year support over the former five year. Effetely bringing Android back to the tablets with official desktop support in the process. It’s even possible to run Android Studio on a Chrome OS. Google is now more in the same league to compete with both the Apple and Microsoft, especially since Apple recently began their own convergence with Big Sur.
While I’ve generally fallen out of favor with Google in favor of Microsoft, Android and Chrome remain my most consistently praised. Despite Honeycomb’s initial failure, none of it this would be possible without it.
