The Making of Google Books: A 17-Year Journey to Build a Laptop

Google has finally launched what it considers its true laptop — the Google Books. But this seemingly obvious product took nearly two decades to arrive. From bold ambitions in 2009 to the device now in hand, blending Android with desktop Chrome, Google went through countless iterations and complete restarts. Why did such an obvious product take so long to materialize? This article traces the full family tree of Google's laptop ambitions.

The Smartbook Era: Ambition and Failure

Using smartphone technology to build lightweight laptops wasn't a new idea. As early as 2009, Qualcomm was eager to ride the Android wave and bring it to the desktop. This was the era of the netbook — cheap, compact devices designed purely for browsing the web. By mobile standards, Windows and its reliance on Intel's x86 chips were too power-hungry, which sparked a wave of efforts to port Android onto the earliest Qualcomm Snapdragon chips.

But the idea quickly fizzled. Caught between the iPad and early ultrabooks, and hampered by an Android that simply wasn't designed to run on landscape devices with keyboards and no touchscreens, the smartbook concept died almost without a trace. Google never certified a single Android smartbook, and the few that made it to market ran open-source Android without an app store or official Google services. The Toshiba AC100 became the first laptop to ship with Android as its primary OS — and the video's author called it the worst laptop they had ever used. The hardware was fine; the software was garbage.

Netbooks emerged around 2007 as a category of cheap, small laptops — epitomized by the Asus Eee PC — typically running Intel Atom processors on 7-to-10-inch screens and selling for as little as $200–$300, designed for light web browsing and word processing. The core logic was "good enough" — in an era before smartphones were ubiquitous and tablets didn't yet exist, they filled a gap for affordable portable computing. But there was always a tension between the Atom's performance ceiling and the resource demands of Windows XP/7, which is exactly why the industry was eager to find an ARM + Android alternative. Qualcomm's Snapdragon launched its first chip in 2008 against this backdrop, and its low power consumption and high integration made porting Android to laptop form factors look genuinely attractive. When the iPad arrived in 2010, the netbook market collapsed within two years — and with it, this wave of Android smartbook experiments lost its reason to exist.

Chrome OS Arrives: A Vision Driven Entirely by the Web

While smartbooks were stumbling, Google had been quietly developing a separate operating system designed from the ground up for web browsing. Chrome OS was revealed in July 2009, with a live demo delivered that year by a young Sundar Pichai. The core idea was elegantly simple: if everything happens inside a browser, why carry the overhead of a full desktop operating system?

Chromebooks were the antithesis of Windows netbooks: fast to boot, inherently secure and bloat-free by design, simple to use, and updated more like a smartphone than a PC. The early going was slow — Google distributed the understated CR48 Chromebook to testers in late 2010. All-black, minimally spec'd, and equipped with built-in Verizon 3G, this device was never meant to be sold. But it offered a window into Google's desktop vision: an experience driven purely by the web, where other apps were beside the point.

Parallel Exploration on the Android Side

Meanwhile, the Android team was approaching the same destination from a different direction. Motorola's Atrix phone in 2011 came with a Lapdock accessory that would boot into a simplified Linux desktop environment, powered by the phone itself — though users still had to carry around a laptop-sized accessory.

The closest thing to a true laptop came from Asus with the Transformer series. Debuted in spring 2011, it could dock into a keyboard base to add battery life and approximate a PC. But it lacked windowed app support, and the app library for large-screen Android devices was thin. The following years spawned a series of convertible devices, including the wonderfully deranged Asus PadPhone — a phone that could slot into a tablet-screen accessory, which in turn could dock into a keyboard base.

Later products like the Lenovo IdeaPad A10 and HP Slatebook added fixed keyboards and official Google support, but still lacked multi-window capability. These were largely the ambitions and experiments of OEMs, not a coherent laptop strategy from the Android team itself. Native Android still lacked key features like split-screen multitasking and windowed apps. Samsung brought multi-window to TouchWiz in 2012, but even Samsung never intended its Android skin to replace a mainstream PC.

The Pixel Brand and Google's Hardware Ambitions

In 2013, Google launched the device that gave birth to the Pixel brand — the Chromebook Pixel. Priced at $1,299 with premium internal hardware and a bright, sharp 3:2 touchscreen, it showed what Chrome OS could achieve with the right hardware.

The light bar on the lid carried through directly to every Google Books today. The second-generation Chromebook Pixel in 2015 further proved that Google could build an excellent laptop — but the absence of desktop-caliber apps remained its Achilles' heel.

Google's direction drifted in the years that followed. In 2015 it launched the Pixel C tablet with a keyboard base, shipping just months before Android officially supported split-screen. Then in 2017, it pivoted back to Chrome OS with the Pixelbook. That same year, Google added Android app support to Chrome OS and launched the Google Play Store on Chromebooks, attempting to address the core criticism that Chromebooks lacked their own app ecosystem and were too dependent on a network connection. But the Android app ecosystem of 2016 wasn't cooperating — most apps couldn't resize freely, were designed by default for phone hardware, and caused all manner of problems on mismatched hardware.

Andromeda's Death and the Two-Platform Parallel

Rumors circulated at the time that Google was preparing to merge Android and Chrome OS into a hybrid system called "Andromeda," and a Google Android laptop seemed almost within reach. But Andromeda was shelved in 2017 — Google apparently preferred to maintain two complementary platforms rather than merge them into one messy hybrid.

So Chrome OS gained Android app support, while Android adopted Chrome-style seamless updates starting with Nougat. Google-branded Android laptops continued to be hit or miss: the 2018 Pixel Slate was dragged down by poor tablet software and weak entry-level configurations; the 2019 Pixelbook Go returned to a clamshell form factor with more reliable results.

Samsung, meanwhile, carved out its own path. Samsung DeX on the 2017 Galaxy S8 could transform the phone into a PC by connecting to an external display with a mouse and keyboard — a far more capable execution than the Motorola Atrix years earlier. The critical advancement was in software: real Android running a desktop-class interface with a taskbar, floating windows, and keyboard shortcuts. The following year, DeX became portable, running directly on the screen of the Galaxy Tab S4. To this day, Samsung has what the author considers the best Android desktop mode, and with the 2025 collaboration with Google, some features in DeX within One UI 9 are worth looking at as models for the full Google Books experience.

Samsung DeX (Desktop Experience) represents the most technically mature branch of Android desktop exploration. Its core mechanism triggers a separate desktop shell via display output on top of the same Android kernel — rather than spinning up a separate Linux container or virtual machine. The phone side continues to function normally, while the external display presents a desktop environment with a taskbar and floating windows, with both sides sharing the same set of app processes. The fundamental difference from the early Motorola Atrix approach is that the Atrix relied on a separate Linux environment called Webtop, where apps didn't communicate with each other; DeX allows the same Android app to simultaneously recognize desktop input (mouse, keyboard) and adjust its layout accordingly. This technical approach depends on the Android framework's underlying support for "freeform window mode" — a feature introduced as a developer option in Android 7.0 Nougat, but never exposed on stock Pixel devices, instead being first deployed in commercial products by Samsung. This explains why the author believes Samsung's Android desktop implementation still leads Google's own.

Large-Screen Optimization and the Final Merger

Entering the 2020s, Google finally got serious about Android and its apps on large screens. In 2022, Android 12L brought a taskbar to the tablet branch to ease app switching and pairing. Desktop windowing entered preview on the Pixel Tablet in 2024, and in 2025, a collaboration with Samsung delivered a more complete UI on external displays.

But building an Android desktop UI that doesn't make you want to throw the device into the ocean was only half the job. Google had always been holding two operating systems heading toward the same destination.

In June 2024, Google announced that Chrome OS would share more underlying technology with Android, citing simplified development, improved integration with phone accessories, and faster delivery of new apps and AI features to Chromebooks. In 2025, Android chief Samir Samat finally said what everyone had been thinking: Google would merge Chrome OS and Android into a single platform. Nearly a decade after the Andromeda rumors, Android 17 is pushing developers to make apps compatible with large screens and freely resizable windows — the software problem that had plagued Android laptops since the smartbook era is finally being addressed at the platform level.

Android 12L was a branch of Android Google released specifically for large-screen devices — tablets, foldables, and Chrome OS — officially launching in March 2022. Key changes included a two-column system UI optimized for screens wider than 600dp, a bottom Taskbar supporting multitasking and App Pairs, and improved split-screen gestures. The "L" in "12L" stands for Large Screen — this was the first time Google explicitly distinguished form factors in an Android version name, marking the moment when large-screen support shifted from OEM customization to a platform-level priority. However, 12L's real-world impact was blunted by device fragmentation — it required active OEM adoption and developer follow-through, and a huge proportion of apps on Google Play still defaulted to portrait phone layouts. This is precisely why Chrome OS was long considered structurally superior to Android tablets for large-screen experiences: the browser itself natively adapts to any aspect ratio, while making Android apps responsive required individual action from tens of thousands of developers.

The Hardware Was Always Ready — Now the Puzzle Is Complete

All of this brings us to the device now in hand — the Lenovo Google Books 15, the largest of the five Google Books models currently available. It runs Android, but ships with full desktop Chrome, including extensions support. Android apps can run natively or be streamed from a phone, and naturally it comes packed with Gemini features. That familiar light bar carries through as well, a deliberate nod to the original Chromebook Pixel.

As the author summarizes: Google could build a quality laptop and a great web experience more than a decade ago. What took all this time was bringing together Android's app ecosystem, a competent desktop UI, and Google's laptop strategy — all in the same place. Whether that's enough to challenge Apple and Microsoft is a question that will have to wait for the full review.