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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why ChromeOS existed in the first place. To me, it would make much more sense if these devices ran Android. After all, there's no apps for ChromeOS -- other than glorified Chrome extensions, and it's not easy for developers to create ChromeOS apps (whereas if I could recycle my Android app, life would be good). Arc welder doesn't seem to work very well either.

Analogously, Apple only has iOS. There's no SafariOS.

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Because it's the perfect Enterprise OS for companies, schools and other organizations that have moved to the web. Currently there's just no OS that would rival ease of deployment for large scale thin clients.

Android on the other hand has very limited provisioning tools and even iOS/OS X is orders of magnitude more expensive and harder to provision, keep updated and running.

> Android on the other hand has very limited provisioning tools

But Google could have improved Android provisioning instead of pushing another OS.

(Which would probably be sensible either way. There's billions of Android devices in enterprise environments that'd benefit from it.)

> Android on the other hand has very limited provisioning tools

It would be orders of magnitude more cost efficient to just create those tools, compared to creating an entire new operating system.

Considering that the "new operating system" is pretty much Chrome running over Linux without any Window Manager, I'm not that sure.

The cost is not just in the form of development expenses. It's about having to support two systems, creating a confusing message for consumers, having to foster and support two different app ecosystems, marketing two different competing platforms, etc.

> Analogously, Apple only has iOS. There's no SafariOS.

I'd say the Apple analogy would be iOS vs.MacOS. One could argue that the iPad Pro makes more sense if it ran MacOS.

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