In a move that everybody saw coming, Google decided to axe its Android tablet segment from its official site. They haven’t launched a new slate in years now, so this was to be expected. Google updated the Android website and removed the entire tablet section.
Right now if you access Android.com, it just shows Phones, Wear, TV, Auto and Enterprise. On May 31st it still had the tablet area, but now that’s gone. If you look at the last version of the page in the Internet Archive you can still spot some slates, like the Shield or Galaxy Tab S2, plus an Xperia model or two. Google seemed to lack interest in tablets for a long while now, not launching any new Nexus or Pixel device in a few years.
They seem to be focused more on Chromebooks and even gave Chrome OS tablets a chance, through Acer’s product. If Google doesn’t care about tablets, it’s hard to imagine that the likes of Samsung or ASUS will. Another bad sign for the segment was the fact that there weren’t any Android P dev tablets available since the beta release of the platform came out.
The future may just bring us Chrome OS tablets with Android apps on board. But then there’s also the Fuchsia project and maybe even the Andromeda…
