My first week with the new Android-powered laptops has been about as rocky as anyone’s, but I’ve slowly learned to like them, even if love still feels a ways off. Every moment that’s impressed me has been thanks to Android, whether I’ve been accessing a native version of a useful app or quickly checking my phone notifications from the laptop user interface.

Android is the best and worst thing about Googlebooks — as an Android devotee, I want to love Googlebooks — but they don’t make it easy. Phone connectivity is flaky, app casting is awkward, and file-sharing seems to be flat-out broken. And that’s just the interaction between a Googlebook and a phone — I have a whole other set of gripes about the limitations of native Android apps on a $1,000 laptop.

Getting started is quick, just a few minutes from beginning to end, including time to register biometric logins, log into a Google account, and connect it to a phone to find your apps and backups. But things get janky once you’re into the OS, though. Even if you use an Android 17 phone to set up the laptop, it’s unlikely to remain connected afterwards for features like file sharing and app casting. Fully pairing either of my Googlebooks to a phone has required toggling cross-device settings on both devices, multiple restarts, and the occasional prayer, until the two devices find each other.

Many, many more apps are a headache to use on an Android laptop. Some don’t have desktop-optimized versions — the mobile version of Slack is truly unworkable in a desktop environment, and Adobe’s Android apps are pale shadows of their desktop selves. Others claim to be ‘Optimized for desktop’ in the Play Store, but in practice that usually means they’ve stretched the UI to fit a desktop scale and included basic mouse and keyboard support — ‘basic’ being the operative word, with most not recognizing right-clicks or occasionally shifting into a portrait view. ‘Made for desktop’ seems to be the only Play Store tag that really counts for much, and I’ve only seen it on a handful of apps.

My laptop needs aren’t complex: I spend 90 percent of my time on my work MacBook Air inside Chrome and Slack, and most of the rest in Photoshop or Lightroom. But all four are subpar on a Googlebook right now, and it’s all because they’re fundamentally Android apps that can’t compete with true desktop alternatives.