I guess I left a bit too much implicit about my prediction on what Google's going to do: I have a strong suspicion that Google sees the Linux/POSIX basis of Android as an albatross around its neck. And ChromeOS—with its near-perfect app isolation from the underlying OS—seems to be a way of getting free of that.
ChromeOS has already gained the ability to run containerized Android apps; and is expecting to begin allowing developers to publish such containerized Android apps to the Chrome Web Store as ChromeOS apps. This means that Android apps will continue to run on ChromeOS, without depending on any of the architectural details of ChromeOS. Android-apps-on-Android prevent Android from getting away from legacy decisions (like being Linux-based); Android-apps-on-ChromeOS have no such effect.
I suspect that in the near term, you'll see Google introducing a Chrome Web Store for Android, allowing these containerized, CWS-packaged Android apps to be run on Android itself; and then, soon after that, deprecating the Play Store altogether in favor of the Chrome Web Store. At that point, all Android apps will actually "be" ChromeOS apps. Just, ones that contain Android object files.
At that point, Google can take a Fuchsia-based ChromeOS and put it on the more powerful mobile devices as "the new Android", where the Android apps will run through Linux ABI translation. But in this new Android (i.e. rebranded ChromeOS), you'll now also have the rest of the Chrome Web Store of apps available.
Google will, along with the "new Android", introduce a new "Android Native SDK" that uses the semantics of Fuchsia. Google will also build a Fuchsia ABI layer for Linux—to serve as a simulator for development, yes, but more importantly to allow people to install these new Fuchsia-SDK-based apps to run on their older Android devices. They'll run... if slowly.
Then, Google will wait a phone generation or two. Let the old Android devices rot away. Let people get mad as the apps written for the new SDK make their phones seem slow.
And then, after people are fed up, they'll just deprecate the old Android ABI on the Chrome Web Store, and require that all new (native) apps published to the CWS have to use the Fuchsia-based SDK.
And, two years after that, it'll begin to make sense again to run "the new Android" on low-end mobile devices, since now all the native apps in the CWS will be optimized for Fuchsia, which will—presumably—have better performance than native Android apps had on Android.
From a branding perspective, that would be terrible. They've already invested a bunch in Google Play brand that isn't Android Apps (Play Music, Play Books, etc).
Seems more likely they'll allow HTML apps into the Play Store, eventually getting rid of the Web Store entirely. They've already done the WebAPK stuff to glue HTML apps into Android.
If, as I suspect, they'd be willing to rename ChromeOS to be "just what Android is now" (like how Mac OS9 was succeeded by NeXTStep branded as Mac OSX), then I don't see why they wouldn't also be willing to rebrand the Chrome Web Store as "what the Google Play Store is now." Of course, they'd keep the music, books, etc.; those are just associated by name, not by backend or by team.
But they wouldn't keep the current content of the Play (Software) Store. The fact that every Android store—even including Google's own—are festering pits of malware and phishing attempts, is a sore spot for Google. And, given their "automated analysis first; hiring human analysts never (or only when legally mandated)" service scaling philosophy, they can't exactly fix it with manual curation. But they would dearly love to fix it.
Resetting the Android software catalogue entirely, with a new generation of "apps" consisting of only web-apps and much-more-heavily-containerized native apps (that can no longer do nearly the number of things to the OS that old native apps can do!) allows Google to move toward a more iOS-App-Store-like level of "preventing users from hurting themselves" without much effort on their part, and without the backlash they'd receive if they did so as an end unto itself. (Contrast: the backlash when Microsoft tried that in Windows 8 with an app store containing only Metro apps.)
I expect that the user experience would be that, on Fuchsia-based devices, you'd have to either click into a "More..." link in the CWS-branded-as-Play-Store, or even turn on some setting, to get access to the "legacy" Play Store, once they deprecate it. It'd still be there—goodness knows people would still need certain abandonware things from it, and be mad if it was just gone entirely; and it'd always need to stick around to serve the devices stuck on "old Android"—but it'd be rather out-of-the-way, with the New apps (of which old Chrome Apps from the CWS would likely be considered just as "new" as newly-published Fuchsia apps upon the store's launch) made front and centre.
> Seems more likely they'll allow HTML apps into the Play Store, eventually getting rid of the Web Store entirely.
I would agree if this was Apple we were talking about (who is of a "native apps uber alles" bent) but this is Google. Google want everyone to be making web-apps rather than native apps, because Google can (with enough cleverness repurposed from Chrome's renderer) spider and analyze web-apps, in a way it can't spider and analyze native apps. Android native apps are to Google as those "home-screen HTML5 bookmark apps" are to Apple: something they wish they could take back, because it really doesn't fit their modern business model.
ChromeOS has already gained the ability to run containerized Android apps; and is expecting to begin allowing developers to publish such containerized Android apps to the Chrome Web Store as ChromeOS apps. This means that Android apps will continue to run on ChromeOS, without depending on any of the architectural details of ChromeOS. Android-apps-on-Android prevent Android from getting away from legacy decisions (like being Linux-based); Android-apps-on-ChromeOS have no such effect.
I suspect that in the near term, you'll see Google introducing a Chrome Web Store for Android, allowing these containerized, CWS-packaged Android apps to be run on Android itself; and then, soon after that, deprecating the Play Store altogether in favor of the Chrome Web Store. At that point, all Android apps will actually "be" ChromeOS apps. Just, ones that contain Android object files.
At that point, Google can take a Fuchsia-based ChromeOS and put it on the more powerful mobile devices as "the new Android", where the Android apps will run through Linux ABI translation. But in this new Android (i.e. rebranded ChromeOS), you'll now also have the rest of the Chrome Web Store of apps available.
Google will, along with the "new Android", introduce a new "Android Native SDK" that uses the semantics of Fuchsia. Google will also build a Fuchsia ABI layer for Linux—to serve as a simulator for development, yes, but more importantly to allow people to install these new Fuchsia-SDK-based apps to run on their older Android devices. They'll run... if slowly.
Then, Google will wait a phone generation or two. Let the old Android devices rot away. Let people get mad as the apps written for the new SDK make their phones seem slow.
And then, after people are fed up, they'll just deprecate the old Android ABI on the Chrome Web Store, and require that all new (native) apps published to the CWS have to use the Fuchsia-based SDK.
And, two years after that, it'll begin to make sense again to run "the new Android" on low-end mobile devices, since now all the native apps in the CWS will be optimized for Fuchsia, which will—presumably—have better performance than native Android apps had on Android.