Yeah that's what immediately came to mind. This must be part of their effort to merge Chrome OS into Android. On the Chrome OS side they already said are going to be replacing the kennel and other system stuff with Androids guts.
That's sad news. ChromeOS is much faster and more efficient than Android. Turning off the Android subsystem in low-end Chromebooks is a huge performance boost, even when no Android apps are open.
To be fair, that’s likely because the Android subsystem is a virtual machine - not running multiple sets of system services / CPU emulation on a computer will make it faster pretty much universally.
It's not just the virtualization, ChromeOS has had a lot of work put into performance. The low-end ARM Chromebooks use the same hardware as budget Android devices, and they're noticeably faster. My Android phone uses more RAM doing nothing from a fresh boot than those Chromebooks even have.
That’s a good point actually. Windowed app performance on Android apps is especially bad since they’re not designed for it (most of my experience is on Android-x86, but window resizing performance is not great)