A brave new (old) world
This requires a bit of context. See, I’m an Android guy. I started my tech journalism career on Android-focused sites, back when smartphones were still the hottest, newest tech on the planet, and tons of people were obsessing over every new model. One of the most exciting parts of Android was the ability to modify the software fairly easily. You could “root” them to get access to all the various bits and bobs, or even load up your own custom-cooked, open-source operating system, colloquially called a ROM.
I have tried all of these flavors of custom Android ROMs.
Various
Rooting and ROMs are still a thing in the Android world, but they’ve fallen off by an order of magnitude since the glory days of 2010-2015. Somewhat because phones are far more locked down, aside from some where open access is a feature, like Google’s Pixel line or the Fairphone. But mostly it’s because phones are powerful and flexible enough to do pretty much everything you want now, no risky or skilled modifications required.
I installed an AOSP-based ROM on my Barnes & Noble Nook Color e-reader to turn it into one of the first full-power Android tablets. But I can’t remember the last time I looked at an Android phone’s bootloader, despite trying dozens (maybe hundreds!) of different ROMs back in the day.
Googlebooks are, at least in the purest technical sense, Android-powered laptops. They’re running Intel and Qualcomm chips — some of the same ones that power Windows laptops, in fact. But Android software is based on open-source code, loath as Google is to admit that these days. That means it should be possible, if not easy or straightforward, to modify it. At the NYC event I asked various representatives from Google and its hardware partners if they would allow users to wipe the laptops clean and install Windows, and they didn’t have an answer ready for me.
Foundry
Fast forward to this week, and we have confirmation via Google support that Googlebooks will arrive with an unlockable bootloader. For those of you who’ve never dug deep into an XDA forum to find a Gapps ZIP that will work with your tweaked CyanogenMod build, that means you should be able to load up custom ROMs.
That’s got the nerdiest part of my soul extremely excited. Custom ROM developers advanced Android’s early years in ways that might be invisible to those outside of that particular niche. Google, Samsung, and others apparently took direct inspiration from the ways that developers modified their software in order to improve it, particularly in terms of the user interface and performance.