Google removes Pixel C, released in December 2015, from the Google Store; Pixel C was the only Android tablet the company sold
Google started selling the Pixel C about two years ago as an Android flagship tablet. The price was high, but it was a good Android tablet. Well, as good as Android tablets could be.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Pixel C arrived on the Google Store in December 2015 at $499 as Google's Android flagship tablet priced like a premium laptop, but within months it needed device-specific firmware fixes for touch input and UI performance — early evidence that Android itself was the weak link on tablets rather than the hardware. Two years on, Google has quietly pulled the device, leaving its store without a single first-party Android tablet.
The removal matters because of what came after it in this arc: Google's next tablet attempt abandoned Android entirely for Chrome OS with the Pixel Slate, and even that was later killed before the company committed to an Android-based Pixel Tablet. The Pixel C's quiet delisting is the first data point in a stop-start tablet strategy still unresolved years later.
First-order effects
- Buyers lose the only Android tablet Google sold directly, pushing anyone who wants a first-party Android slate toward third-party makers or off the platform entirely.
- Google's own hardware lineup now covers phones and laptops but no tablets, an odd gap for the company that controls Android.
Second-order effects
- The vacancy pressures Google to answer what its tablet play actually is — which it eventually did by switching operating systems, debuting the Chrome OS-based Pixel Slate rather than a Pixel C successor.
- Android tablet makers lose the reference device that set a benchmark for build and price, leaving Samsung and other OEMs to define the category without a Google standard-bearer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's tablet strategy keeps oscillating between Android and Chrome OS until the software side justifies flagship hardware — a cycle that only closed when the company committed to a new Android-based Pixel Tablet after killing the Slate.
- A platform owner repeatedly exiting a device category signals to OEMs that tablets are a secondary surface, entrenching the iPad's position and narrowing Android's ambitions to phones and foldables.
The trend: Google's tablet hardware strategy lurches between Android and Chrome OS, exiting categories its software cannot yet carry and re-entering only when the OS catches up.