I don't develop on Android so I have no perspective on whether it's a better situation, but as a user of both Android and ChromeOS on the daily, my impression of ChromeOS is that it is minimally intrusive, updates instantly, sleeps and wakes instantly, switches users instantly. My impression of Android is updates take forever, there are 90 minutes of hideous jank after a restart, and it takes 15+ minutes to take a bug report. But I have no way of telling from this announcement which parts of the Android tech stack are responsible for it being a pyramid of jank. However it sounds like Android has won an internal turf war and it seems inevitable that their user-oblivious development and release process will eventually tarnish ChromeOS.

So I used to be an Android dev and left years ago because of how mismanaged their upper levels of the stack became. Their Java API was never good (j2me was cleaner) but somehow the extensions rarely represented an improvement and just introduced more new problems.

The low level pieces of Android have dramatically improved over the years though, and are clearly battle tested at enormous scale. Binder, of recent security problems, is functionally very useful. The graphics system handles DRM and HDR on different hardware surprisingly well these days, and even the audio stack is far less annoying than it used to be. Considering that Android devices are expected to run continuously this is no small achievement. Some years ago I wrote and deployed Android code that decodes and plays video, with audio, constantly, for months on end, synchronized to an external clock, on a random cheap OEM board, while downloading the next one over a flaky network, with relatively minor alterations to the OS being necessary. It may be possible on other things but I would probably still be debugging it.