You would think that two products made by the same company (and a large company at that) would be able to seamlessly integrate with each other. But over the years we’ve seen that’s not always the case, especially with Google products. They currently have two operating systems, Android for mobile devices and Chrome OS for laptops, but these two don’t seem to play well together. It looks like Google wants to change things now as a commit named OneChrome demo has been spotted and might bridge the two worlds to make it easier for users.
A post on XDA Developers talks about the OneChrome as a project that Google is working on that will be able to get the two OS working together for those that are using both their laptop and their smartphone together. Probably one important thing that they spotted here is the sharing of phone numbers between the two systems. The code indicates that you can send a number from your Chromebook to your Android device and it should open up in the dialer directly so you can start a call with just one tap. This Click to Call feature may also be integrated into Chrome on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Another useful thing that they spotted in this commit is that you’ll be able to share your clipboard or that place that holds text you’ve copied, between Chrome OS and Android. Those who do a lot of copy-pasting between devices and use 3rd party apps like Evernote or Keep that sync between them will probably breathe a sigh of relief if this becomes a reality. The best news is that both the phone number and clipboard sharing will use end-to-end encryption so you can share sensitive information without fear (well, sort of).
They have also spotted a Wi-Fi password syncing feature which will allow you to sync that particular data not just for your Chrome OS devices but also to your Android device. So what you do is you just enter one Wi-Fi password when setting up your device and all the other ones you’ve saved on your Google account will be restored.
But of course, all of these things are just in the early stages so we don’t know yet if it will ever see the light of day. But based on what we’re seeing so far, these are pretty useful things for those who use both Android and ChromeOS.
