Google reportedly drops plans for Android Silver

Remember it wasn’t too long ago that there were rumors about Google planning an Android Silver program? This was basically Google’s way of merging their Nexus lineup of handsets and Google Play Edition devices, where instead of only having one Nexus handset a year, users could have more such devices to choose from.

According to a handful of new reports, it appears that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is discontinuing a plan dubbed Android Silver that would have created a line of devices that featured a pure and unaltered version of Android, with the Android brand–and not the brand of the phone’s manufacturer–front and center. Instead, now it appears Google is moving forward with efforts to combine its Android operating system for smartphones with its Chrome operating system for laptops.