Thoughts on Google Photos and Android apps on ChromeOS

I have been thinking a lot about ChromeOS lately. I recently started moving my mother’s photo collection over from OneDrive to Google Photos in an effort to back up 10 years of digital phones she can collected on our ancient Dell desktop. We bought the machine back in 2008 when I was a freshman in college over my first Christmas break. The machine came with Windows Vista at the time and my dad spent the princely sum of $1200 after all was said and done on a desktop, monitor (Yes, sold separately), printer, and Geek Squad warranty (We were naive at the time and thought it was a good idea). Over the years the machine has been upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows 7 to Windows 8, and finally Windows 10. Even today, the machine runs well enough with its slower platter hard drive only having to have its hard drive replaced, dusted out, and some new thermal compound applied over the years to the CPU. Its gotten to the point though that everybody in the household has their own laptops because of the dropping price of Windows laptops my sister has a $240 HP Stream for high school and my other brother and other sister have moved to Macs. It’s just gotten to the point that nobody really uses the old desktop and it sounds like a jet engine taking off because the generic Intel Drivers in 2016 do not do a great job at regulating the temperature so every 15 minutes the machine feels like it needs to flare the fans to prevent itself from becoming a fireball. Even with all of that with everybody doing everything from communications to photos and games on their smartphones the desktop has really been relegated to a web browser for research for school and a Microsoft Office machine. I bought my mother a new printer 3 years ago, a wireless HP that includes both Airprint and Google Cloud Print so even that has been taken away from the desktop. In 2016 the once glorious desktop has been reduced to:

• A web browser
• Microsoft Office machine
• Photo storage and management

With that in mind I am going to officially retire the desktop now that I have migrated my mother’s photo library over to Google Photos and likened it to killing the landline, they are going to see if they can do without the desktop. I’m sure they will be fine, but if they do need a cheap machine for browsing the web and getting basic office work done then I’m going to recommend a Chromebook. I got my grandparents two Toshiba Chromebook and they have worked out really well. The machines are fast, simple, and require zero maintenance. On the chance occasion that my grandmother clicks a bad link on Facebook all I have to do is ask her to power cycle the machine. As an IT person who lives 3.5 hours away from family members this has become a God-send from a technical support perspective and for them they never feel like they need to call me for help.

On top of that I recently played with Android apps on a Acer Chromebook 15 at work and was impressed with the results. While the hardware did not have a touchscreen and it was still running in the early-testing canary channel I was able to run several games and apps with little to no problem. I listened to music in Spotify and podcasts in Pocketcasts and then played the first 5 minutes of A Wolf Among Us and Alto’s Adventure with no issues other than the trackpad being awkward for real-time touch events. I think the experience will be much better with a touchscreen and even now I was impressed with how well things worked, especially considering the laptop was only $250–300. I think ChromeOS has real potential to be competitive with Windows. Maybe not in 2017, but as things get better I can see it posing a real threat. Right now the real hang up is going to be creative apps for me, namely photo and video editing. I think though that if Adobe keeps pushing Lightroom for Android forward it could become a really interesting platform for photographers if Google partners with them and support RAW storage and editing in Google Photos.

For my family’s needs though I think that ChromeOS going forward will be enough. For my own needs the idea of using a Chromebook as a client front-end to various cloud services, Android apps, and maybe a in-home NAS and remote app server seems interesting. I use a bunch of Apple gear now, but maybe if these things keep evolving I will look into getting one for myself because they are much cheaper. Also, the Google Pixel and Google Home have peaked my interest. I find the Pixel a little boring as a phone, but the software interests me immensely, especially with the artificial intelligence Google is baking into Google Photos, Google Assistant, Google Now, Google Music, and more. AI could be the next big thing and it is not something I can really replicate at home myself. Like most geeks my needs are more complicated than the average bear and I do not see ChromeOS as a way to simplify operations. For what I could gain in client simplicity and battery life I would end up having to push my workload to other computers and cloud services. There is a lot I could do in the cloud, but I would still use Windows or MacOS to manage servers, editing photos/podcasts/video, and scripting/website design. I think it could be an interesting experiment, but right now I still prefer the Apple ecosystem and at work I live in a Microsoft-powered world with Exchange/Skype/Windows Server/SharePoint.

Maybe if I worked for an organization that used Google Apps Chromebooks would be a no-brainer, but right now they remain a curiosity. I guess only time will tell if they really take off, but I feel like they have potential. It seems like younger people today like my siblings are not as tied to Microsoft Office or Windows as I was when I grew up. I think that’s going to be the key to Google’s success. I think Google also needs to court Adobe or get serious with creatives. I don’t know if that’s in Google’s DNA like it is Apple’s, but I feel like productivity and creative applications like Photoshop, Aperture, InDesign, Audition, etc. are the two critical pillars of any general operating system environment. I feel like Google already has a solid start with the productivity category with Google Drive/Docs/Slides/Sheets, but they need to push beyond that with photography, music editing, and video creation. Maybe I’m reading too deep into all of this, but this is where I would like Google to push next. I think they could do an interesting take on it and provide unique value if they could encourage creativity with machine learning and AI recommendations. That’s another topic for another blog post though.