Amir Efrati on The Information has revealed the conversation between Google and some chip makers about “developing chips based on Google’s own preferred designs“.

The idea here is says Efrati, to “bring more uniformity” and “be more competitive with Apple’s phones at the high end of the market”

I have some questions for Google. For example, if they design special chips for their Android phones, will they release those designs to their partners? Or will they keep those designs for themselves? Qualcomm, MediaTek and others won’t be happy about that, and even if Google becomes a hardware company the challenges are huge if they don’t want to be perceived as counterproductive to their partners.

Designing chips is no small feat either. Apple has recruited a lot of talent there in the past few years in order to accomplish what they have today, and I suspect Google is absolutely dependent on companies such as Qualcomm in order to design those chips. They simply don’t have the resources to do that by themselves. Efrati confirms this:

In the discussions, which occurred this fall, Google representatives put forward designs of chips it was interested in co-developing, including a phone’s main processor

Designing a chip and making it available to all phone makers would be really interesting. Hopefully that will make fragmentation not such a big problem in the future, and in fact I see this having some part to play in that hypothetical merger of Android and Chrome OS, which for sure will benefit too of special chips designed by Google. Hardware & Software going hand in hand is a safe bet here.

Apple was right, it seems.