Snapchat is coming to the Google Pixelbook. Wait, what?
During its event to announce a new set of hardware products, Google snuck in a little surprise.
In the announcement for the Pixelbook, a new high-end Chromebook, Google Director of Product Management Matt Vokoun said the company was working with Snap to bring a version of Snapchat to the device. It didn't specify a date.
"The Snap team is working with us to bring an amazing Snapchat experience to the larger screen on Pixelbook," Vokoun said.
It's a curious statement, since Android apps (including Snapchat) have been able to run on many Chromebooks since last year (although sometimes with difficulty). Vokoun himself said Snapchat was already one of the "most popular" apps among early users of Android on Chromebooks. A Google spokesperson later clarified in a statement to Mashable that the Google Play store was previously in beta, but it's now coming out of beta for the Pixelbook and other Chromebooks.
In any case, it's hard to fathom why you'd want to run Snapchat on a Chromebook. The app is entirely designed for mobile — there is virtually no desktop experience at all — and it only supports one device login at a time. The same thing that prevents you from logging into Snapchat on two phones would seemingly prevent you from logging in on a Pixelbook and your smartphone, at least at the same time.
Could this mean Snapchat will soon support multiple device sign-in? Is the app just coming to the Pixelbook or all Chromebooks? Are other desktop experiences for Snapchat on the way?
We asked Google and Snap those very important questions. Google clarified that the app would be coming to all Chromebooks that can run Android apps (not just the Pixelbook), but Snap was mum on the what this means for Snapchat on multiple devices or other desktops. Still, we can't wait to ask Google Assistant to slap a Snapchat dog-ear lens on our faces so we can share the photo via Google Drive, which is presumably the primary use case.
Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
