Is Google Looking to Merge Android, Chrome OSes?

Google (GOOG) quietly has appointed Hiroshi Lockheimer, its mobile OS Android Engineering vice president, to oversee the desktop and notebook-focused Chrome OS engineering team, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Linus Upson, who previously served as Chrome’s top engineer, is still with the company but no longer works in that role, according to the Journal’s sources. The move puts Lockheimer as the head both of Android and Chrome engineering.

Does Lockheimer’s ascension indicate that the Android and Chrome platforms are closer to joining under one umbrella? Is it another step toward what many see as the inevitable merger of the two Google operating platforms, whose momentum began more than a year and a half ago when the vendor replaced Andy Rubin, its former Android senior vice president, with Sundar Pichai, who added Android to his Chrome leadership?

At the time, the change appeared to signal Google’s admission that it saw the need to coordinate or perhaps even merge the two operating systems, which the Lockheimer promotion now seems to confirm.

“So far, we have been in a world which has been pretty straightforward: Android phones and tablets and Chrome laptops,” Pichai said in March, 2013. “But lines do blur.”

Lockheimer joined Google in 2006, after working at both Microsoft (MSFT) and Palm. Earlier this year, he was one of a number of Google personnel involved in the second Apple (AAPL) Samsung patent infringement trial, testifying on Samsung’s behalf that many of the features of the Korean device maker’s phones were designed by Google in its Android development and not Apple.

According to the Journal’s report, Lockheimer won’t be handling engineering for the Chrome browser, Chromecast streaming device or Chromebook hardware.

He recently told Re/code that even though Google has tied the customization hands of Android Wear hardware makers, at least for the time being, at some point it will loosen the reins to developmental tailoring for wearables, televisions, cars and other platforms.

“It’s not some Google-way-or-the-highway kind of thing,” he said, but rather that the vendor wanted to approach the new mobile markets cautiously before allowing a deeper level of customization to hardware makers.

Google’s preference is for device manufacturers to develop custom apps rather than branded versions of the Android UI, Lockheimer told Re/code.

“We’re trying to find the right balance of differentiation and customization,” he said.