Chrome OS and Android will remain as separate operating systems, each addressing specific requirements, Google's executive chairman said Thursday.
There will be more commonality between the two OSes, but they are going to be separate for a very long time because they solve different problems, said Eric Schmidt at an event in Delhi.
"Chrome and Chromium are the world's best HTML5 authoring and development systems," Schmidt said, according to video footage of the event from a television channel. Android, which is primarily a Java-like development environment, solves a different problem, he added.
Chromium is the open-source project that feeds code into the Chrome OS.
Google announced recently that Sundar Pichai, the Google senior vice president who has led the Chrome OS, Chrome browser and Apps product teams, is also handling Android's development, replacing Andy Rubin. This prompted a question from the audience whether Google may now jettison one of the OSes.
"We don't make decisions based on who the leader is," Schmidt said. "We make the decisions at Google based on where the technology takes us."
Apple and Microsoft both have separate OSes for laptops and mobile devices. OS X runs Mac computers and iOS powers the iPod touch, iPad and iPhone. Microsoft similarly offers Windows RT, an OS for devices with ARM chips, and Windows Phone besides the Windows OS.
Schmidt said, in response to another question, that Apple would continue to be a technology innovator and "build beautiful products," regardless of the market share of the products. Apple is a key competitor of companies like Samsung Electronics that make devices around the Android OS.
