Android Q hasn’t even officially made its way to smartphones yet — outside of a beta on Pixel devices — and Google is already working to bring support to Chromebooks.
According to a code change submitted to the Chromium Gerrit — an online tool for collaborating on and submitting code — Google started work on bringing Q to Chrome OS.
Chrome OS gained access to Android apps in 2016, with support built on Android Nougat. Google skipped Oreo, and later updated Chrome OS to Pie on some devices.
The commit includes three codenames referencing different ‘boards,’ or platforms that Chrome can function on. In the case of these boards, they refer to virtual machines running Android apps in Chrome OS.
The codenames are as follows:
- betty-nyc-arc
- betty-pi-arc
- betty-qt-arc
The ‘betty’ part of those codenames refers to virtual machines running the Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) according to official Google documentation. Likewise, the ‘arc’ term in the code refers to that Android Runtime.
As for the middle part of the codenames, 9to5Google says ‘nyc,’ ‘pi’ and ‘qt’ refer to Android Nougat, Pie and Q respectively.
Further, 9to5 notes the commit later dropped the ‘betty-pi-arc’ and ‘betty-qt-arc’ boards for the ‘betty-arcnext’ board. Likely, Google will use that board for developing Android Q, the ‘next’ version of Android. Android Pie will probably become the default ‘betty’ board, and the new nyc board will be for legacy devices that only support Nougat.
Regardless, this marks the beginning of development on Android Q support for Chrome OS. It’ll likely be available later this year unless Google changes its mind.
Source: Chromium Gerrit Via: 9to5Google
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