You can now run Googlebook OS on your Mac, unofficially of course

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.

Unlike clunky software emulation, the project runs an ARM-based guest on macOS’s native hypervisor framework using components derived from UTM, QEMU, MoltenVK, and ANGLE. The setup requires an Apple Silicon Mac with at least 16GB of RAM, Xcode Command Line Tools, Android SDK/NDK packages, and roughly 60GB of free storage space to build.

The automated installation script pulls down a real Dell XPS Googlebook recovery image and Google’s Cuttlefish virtual device build directly from official servers. It then handles the technical heavy lifting and wraps the environment into a clickable “Googlebook VM.app” bundle for your macOS Dock.

Naturally, since this is an unofficial tinkering effort, it is not meant to be a daily driver replacement in any shape or form. Once booted, Bluetooth doesn’t work, an emulated TPM daemon wastes background CPU cycles, and the display output is currently capped at 60Hz. There’s likely more bugs to be found, too.

Still, having bootable access provides a fascinating early look into Google’s desktop vision. Given that Googlebook’s Android app support remains complicated, hands-on experiments like this give enthusiasts and developers a rare sandbox to poke around the new platform without spending money on new hardware. Users who find the OS to their liking can then make an informed decision.