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Notice that they never say Android is here to stay - Maybe Chrome OS will become the Phone/Tablet OS under a new guise? Google's working on a new UI layer and

Notice that they never say Android is here to stay - Maybe Chrome OS will become the Phone/Tablet OS under a new guise? Google's working on a new UI layer and potential backwards compatibility for older Android apps, which points in that direction: - Chromium developers are working on a DART-based Mobile UI framework and execution engine, Flutter (http://flutter.io/ http://flutter.io/). It's looking to be far better than the existing Android UI system - built for touch and 120fps from the start. This uses the Dartium VM and a bridge to allow the DART apps to use all the native features of the platform, it's much more than just another web framework. Development on this is very active right now, clearly a sizable team working fulltime - and they're building new developer tools also. There was a talk on this a while ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnIWl33YMwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnIWl33YMwA . - Google has built a Runtime to allow existing Android Java-based apps to run on Chrome OS, and is currently testing this and working with developers to get their apps to run on it. It doesn't make much sense to invest in building that out just for chromebooks, since the experience on a Chromebook with Android apps is pretty awful (can't resize etc), but it makes total sense if it's going to be how legacy Java/Android apps run on the new Chrome based phone OS. The sad truth is that Android simply isn't a very well engineered system - it's been improved over time, but problems persist - like the complex update process leading to unsatisfied users and security problems, poor UI performance (even now, Android can barely do simple animations at a steady 60fps on the latest Nexus devices, and has little hope of allowing for the beautiful animations the Material Design team has come up with), and poor battery life. Google's also at a dead-end with Java given the ongoing legal battles, and with Apache Harmony dead they have to maintain the standard library implementation themselves. On the other hand, Chrome OS performs great, has awesome battery life on Chromebooks, is quite possibly the most secure end-user OS ever, and Chromebooks get speedy updates for at least 5 years. I know which one I'd choose as the basis for a merged OS. Of course, if the merge is more Chrome OS than Android, they'd be saying exactly what they're saying now - The last thing they want is an Osbourne effect hitting the current Android phones.

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thebaer 11y ago
These are good points, but I view their efforts on ARC more as them expanding the Chrome store's app catalog than Chrome OS completely eating Android. And as an aside, I think many developers simply don't devote the effort to fully developing their Android apps for Chrome OS. I have an (albeit simple) Android app I publish on Chrome OS, and it's my product's most popular platform. So it gets special attention, and supports resizing with the fairly undocumented "resize" value in the app's manifest: "arc_metadata": { "resize": "reconfigure", "formFactor": "tablet", "orientation": "landscape", }
Dylan16807 11y ago
>Notice that they never say Android is here to stay - Maybe Chrome OS will become the Phone/Tablet OS under a new guise? Or Google could give two names to the same thing, like Youtube Red and Google Play Music.
- jordanthoms 11y ago
  Yeah, from a marketing perspective they'll never say that Android's dead, even if it's quite different underneath.
jusben1369 11y ago
That's because no one seriously thinks for a minute that Android is not here to stay. When you hear about the dominant global mobile operating system (share, not profit) and a niche desktop operating system "merging" it's not difficult to work out which one is more at risk. This announcement is aimed strictly for business consumption and has nothing to do with technology. Google will be inundated with hardware developers (OEM's) and large Chrome OS buyers (distributors, educational groups) saying "the Microsoft sales people are telling me you're abandoning Chrome OS. This is very disturbing to us as we've made a significant investment in your technology!" This is their effort to rebut some of that FUD which may or may not be FUD.
- vidarh 11y ago
  It would presumably be fud in the sense that to merge ChromeOS and Android wouldn't require all that much in order to provide the functionality people use ChromeOS for. If it provides Chrome + pnacl + support for installing/running Chrome apps, it won't even have to be visible to people that the system underneat is largely Android unless they want to know. I have a ChromeBook, and to be honest, I have no idea what the filesystem is like, even. As much as the geek in me wants to play around, the pragmatic in me recognises that I bought it to have a light, low maintenance way of running a web brower + ssh on the go, and is too busy doing other stuff than poking around... So assuming that people will be able to keep running the same apps, with a similarly clean launcher, there's every reason for them to sell that as "ChromeOS isn't going anywhere" even if they may or may not be fibbing from a purely technical point of view.
ocean3 11y ago
like the complex update process leading to unsatisfied users - unsatisfied tech users? Don't thin the normal public care or knows about the version of Android they are running.
m45t3r 11y ago
Never thought this way, this is actually a great idea. I mean, even if Android runs Androids apps natively, in most cases developers still needs to include Android support library, to provide backwards compatibility with older versions of Android. So since we need Android support library anyway, why not simply include the complete runtime (like ARC), in base of a really simple and slim OS, like ChromeOS with Flutter UI. This new OS would get direct updates from Google, like ChromeOS. To get legacy support of apps designed for Android, simple repackage every existing application with ARC. Win-win situation, right?

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thebaer 11y ago

These are good points, but I view their efforts on ARC more as them expanding the Chrome store's app catalog than Chrome OS completely eating Android. And as an aside, I think many developers simply don't devote the effort to fully developing their Android apps for Chrome OS. I have an (albeit simple) Android app I publish on Chrome OS, and it's my product's most popular platform. So it gets special attention, and supports resizing with the fairly undocumented "resize" value in the app's manifest: "arc_metadata": { "resize": "reconfigure", "formFactor": "tablet", "orientation": "landscape", }

Dylan16807 11y ago

>Notice that they never say Android is here to stay - Maybe Chrome OS will become the Phone/Tablet OS under a new guise? Or Google could give two names to the same thing, like Youtube Red and Google Play Music.

jordanthoms 11y ago
Yeah, from a marketing perspective they'll never say that Android's dead, even if it's quite different underneath.

jusben1369 11y ago

That's because no one seriously thinks for a minute that Android is not here to stay. When you hear about the dominant global mobile operating system (share, not profit) and a niche desktop operating system "merging" it's not difficult to work out which one is more at risk. This announcement is aimed strictly for business consumption and has nothing to do with technology. Google will be inundated with hardware developers (OEM's) and large Chrome OS buyers (distributors, educational groups) saying "the Microsoft sales people are telling me you're abandoning Chrome OS. This is very disturbing to us as we've made a significant investment in your technology!" This is their effort to rebut some of that FUD which may or may not be FUD.

vidarh 11y ago
It would presumably be fud in the sense that to merge ChromeOS and Android wouldn't require all that much in order to provide the functionality people use ChromeOS for. If it provides Chrome + pnacl + support for installing/running Chrome apps, it won't even have to be visible to people that the system underneat is largely Android unless they want to know. I have a ChromeBook, and to be honest, I have no idea what the filesystem is like, even. As much as the geek in me wants to play around, the pragmatic in me recognises that I bought it to have a light, low maintenance way of running a web brower + ssh on the go, and is too busy doing other stuff than poking around... So assuming that people will be able to keep running the same apps, with a similarly clean launcher, there's every reason for them to sell that as "ChromeOS isn't going anywhere" even if they may or may not be fibbing from a purely technical point of view.

ocean3 11y ago

like the complex update process leading to unsatisfied users - unsatisfied tech users? Don't thin the normal public care or knows about the version of Android they are running.

m45t3r 11y ago

Never thought this way, this is actually a great idea. I mean, even if Android runs Androids apps natively, in most cases developers still needs to include Android support library, to provide backwards compatibility with older versions of Android. So since we need Android support library anyway, why not simply include the complete runtime (like ARC), in base of a really simple and slim OS, like ChromeOS with Flutter UI. This new OS would get direct updates from Google, like ChromeOS. To get legacy support of apps designed for Android, simple repackage every existing application with ARC. Win-win situation, right?