Credit: Richard Priday / Android Authority
TL;DR
- A developer has released an open-source toolchain (called “gbos-vm”) that lets Apple Silicon Mac owners run Googlebook OS inside a GPU-accelerated virtual machine.
- The setup requires an Apple Silicon Mac with at least 16GB of RAM, Xcode Command Line Tools, Android SDK/NDK packages, and 60GB of free space to automatically fetch and build the environment.
- This Googlebook OS experience on a Max is only intended as an experimental preview rather than a daily driver, as the setup currently has limitations, including broken Bluetooth, a background TPM daemon issue, and a 60Hz display cap.
Googlebooks have started reaching the hands of consumers, but not everyone can afford to splurge hundreds of dollars on a new machine, just to see the hype behind Googlebook OS. If you find yourself eager to try out the Android-powered laptop experience and have an Apple Silicon-powered Mac around, you are in luck: a developer has packaged everything required to get Googlebook OS up and running on it and released the entire toolchain publicly.
Developer Skylar Taylor-Barrick has shared an open-source toolchain on Reddit and GitHub. Called “gbos-vm,” the installer script allows users to boot a GPU-accelerated virtual machine running Googlebook OS directly on Apple Silicon Macs.