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Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks
- magnumkarter 10y agoThis is great!!! I wonder if it will be possible to install the Play Store in Chromium OS. I know that Chromium has some support for installing Android .apk files.
- Nowyouknow 10y agoAlso would love to know if this works. This might eliminate my desire to buy the Android Pixel C device. On the flip side, if this is limited to Chromebooks, this might increase the desire to buy the Chromebook Pixel.
- 0x6c6f6c 10y agoPersonally looking at HPs new Chromebook line coming out [0] Very sleek design, better than the Pixel imo, and several tiers if you don't want to start at $1k. [0]: http://store.hp.com/us/en/ContentView?storeId=10151&catalogId=10051&langId=-1&eSpotName=chromebook13 http://store.hp.com/us/en/ContentView?storeId=10151&catalogI...
- colemickens 10y agoThat HP does look enticing and I know it seems small, but I really like the Pixel 2015 having the USB Type-C on each side of the laptop. I can always plug in the cord without having to double back to run it under the laptop based on where the port is. Sometimes the extra foot lets me reach the power socket. (And less stress on the connector). (Though the lack of upstream kernel support means that I will probably go back to MBPs for my next personal device. I've reverted to just ChromeOS + mosh client for now)
- astrojams 10y agoI have the 2015 Pixel and sadly the USB type C ports on either side are my favorite feature. I LOVE not having the chord wrap under the notebook.
- terinjokes 10y agoAgreeing with the sibling comment, this does look great! Know if there's any new Chromebooks like it that are shipping with an LTE chip? I have Project Fi, and would love to have data available wherever I need it.
- ojn 10y agoYou're thinking of the previous ARC solution that used NaCl and Arc Welder to convert apks. In this case, the Android container contents is not opensourced. They might or might not be down the road, it hasn't been decided on yet. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/the-play-store-comes-to-chrome-os-but-not-the-way-we-were-expecting/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/the-play-store-comes-... has a bit more info on that. Same with a few of the pieces in Chrome OS that are needed; not all of them are open at this time but might be down the road.
- soared 10y agoThat might mean the holy grail is achievable: Netflix on the rpi. /s
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoComing soon: Chrome OS made into merely an alternative Android home screen, and Chromebooks becoming “Droidbooks”.
- hendersoon 10y agoDon't see why not. ChromeOS is a perfectly fine windowed UI, which is exactly what Android needs on convertible and laptop form factors. Chrome becomes one app that runs on ChromeOS, and all the android apps are first-class citizens too. Sounds great to me.
- Aleman360 10y agoSounds like Windows 8 where the desktop was an "app" on the Start screen.
- sharms 10y agoThis is a big move and will majorly impact desktop / laptop computing. Now the entire ecosystem of Android apps (even Microsoft Office, Snapchat, Photoshop Express) is going to be available, and arguably this platform is much more complete than say, Universal Apps (Microsoft)
- NetStrikeForce 10y agoIt is more complete than universal apps, but still minimal compared to the Windows ecosystem.
- Nullabillity 10y agoAll mobile applications, regardless of platform, are inherently crippled. It's not as bad as iOS (at least there are user-accessible generic files...), but there's still a lot of stuff that's crippled because of crap like "simplicity" or "we don't have enough screen real estate".
- Splines 10y agoHopefully it will push the Android ecosystem to accommodate larger screen sizes.
- imtringued 10y agoNot to mention that my fingers are huge.
- yohui 10y agoIronically, this also means Chrome OS will support Firefox. I wonder if support will be limited to Google Play, or whether the framework can be used to run third-party apps such as F-Droid.
- pgrote 10y agoWhile this is a great step forward, I am disappointed in the list of chromebooks supported. I looked over the list and cannot find a common thread as to what is supported and what isn't. Does anyone know? My Acer C720 with an i3 isn't on the list, but my Toshiba Chromebook 2 with lesser specs is on the list.
- sunnyps 10y agoThree Chromebooks are supported initially including the Pixel 2015. Other Chromebooks will be supported later this year. Source: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6401474 https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6401474
- buro9 10y agoPixel 2015? So there is a new one coming?
- pgrote 10y agoCorrect. My question was about that specific list and I should have been more specific.
- jxy 10y agoI'm disappointed that there is no Cr-48 on the list. I'm still using it as a browser/terminal. It sucks on high-res video now, so I have to force low-res on youtube/HBO/…. I really wished I could run some less demanding android apps. Anyone here hasn't tossed it?
- 10y ago
- asimuvPR 10y agoGoogle: What does this mean for ARC users?
- bonaldi 10y agoNo support for the original Pixel? It's more powerful than quite a few on the list. Damn.
- tjalex 10y agoMine feels like it's slowly turning into a paperweight. :\
- mdaniel 10y agoI haven't personally tried it, but I think that the majority of ChromeOS is open source, and in theory the bits that aren't (maybe bios, network drivers, video drivers, etc.) will likely be on your existing Chromebook. Maybe surf around the XDA forums and see if anyone has insight into the matter: http://forum.xda-developers.com/hardware-hacking/chromebooks http://forum.xda-developers.com/hardware-hacking/chromebooks
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- supercanuck 10y agoI think having a touch screen is important.
- mitoyarzun 10y agoThe original Pixel has a touchscreen.
- icebraining 10y agoI've used my Android tablet exclusively with a mouse for more than a month, it works fine. With a multitouch touchpad, it should be even better.
- eugeneionesco 10y agoNowhere says there is not support for the original Pixel. It just does not get it at this point just like other chromebooks. >Google Play will start rolling out in the developer channel with M53 on the ASUS Chromebook Flip, the Acer Chromebook R 11 and the latest Chromebook Pixel. Over time, this will roll out to other Chromebooks in the market too
- headmelted 10y agoObviously there's no-one in the world that didn't know this was coming, but even so, I feel for the Remix OS guys. I assumed at the time their objective was to be acqui-hired by Google, but I can't see why there would be a reason for that now, or how they'd hope to compete in this situation. Congratulations to the Chrome O/S and Android teams. I was briefly on a Chromebook when my laptop packed in, and but for the absence of solid developer tools, I'd have stayed forever. There's a lot to be said for convenience.
- jshevek 10y ago"but for the absence of solid developer tools, I'd have stayed forever." Are you saying that Arch or Ubuntu and everything that runs on them aren't enough for you? Or that crouton hadn't evolved far enough at the time? These days you can run crouton in a window or a tab within ChromeOS. Launch an xterm or IntelliJ or whatever each into their own windows, displaying within ChromeOS. I'd say that the 2015 Pixel (plus crouton) is one of the best ultrabooks for devs.
- david-given 10y agoCrouton in a window doesn't really work so well --- on my Asus Flip it frequently forgets to redraw the window after changes, which makes it nigh unusable. I haven't tried rootless mode, though. I'll agree with you about Chromebooks for developers, though (well, if you like doing everything from text mode, which I do). My ARM-based Flip is a lovely machine. Cheap, ultraportable, completely silent, ludicrous battery life and the quad-core ARM flies. I just wish they'd get X running in a VC working. (The Flip uses a special graphics stack which apparently makes this hard.)
- jshevek 10y agoThat's too bad about the Flip and the screen not redrawing. The Pixel doesn't seem to have this problem, and its runs android studio on X no problem. It can do AS on X in a window or tab, or as a separate desktop. The last mode seems to require the two systems to handing over low level control of the hardware to each other, whereas the first two modes are more seamless. So yes trying the other approach might solve the redraw problem. Yes, for text mode only things are even easier. The "crosh window" app (plus tmux, etc) is all I need to perfectly happy with Crouton.
- radarsat1 10y agoI'm curious just on the technical side, what does this mean for the many apps that include ARM code? (i.e. apps that use the NDK) Will there be some emulation, or do apps generally ship with multi architecture? Edit: Ok, the answer is, both. Thanks ;)
- HNcow 10y agoI'm not an expert in this field, but I did want to say that I had an Asus Zenfone 2 (x86 phone) for a brief time, and app compatibility was never an issue. I ran into 0 apps that I couldn't run.
- mrmose 10y agoI had the Zenfone 2 as well, and the notable exception to that was Snapchat. About six months ago, they stopped making x86 versions of the app, and video was pretty pitiful.
- Splendor 10y agoHave you had a chance to compare that to the performance of their non-x86 app? I'm curious because I've found SnapChat to perform exceptionally poorly on every Android device I've tried.
- mrmose 10y agoYes. No issue with the Nexus 5. Recording video with the Zenfone 2 was pretty poor -- totally choppy.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoMost apps ship with multiple binaries for the appropriate architecture. For those apps that don't have the necessary binaries the native code will be translated on the fly to the host architecture instruction set. Since Chromebook's are significantly faster than smartphones the small performance hit shouldn't be noticeable.
- ralmidani 10y agoHopefully this leads to the release of ARM devices with more than 32GB of storage.
- stkoelle 10y agoIntellij for Android, would help a lot some developers ;-)
- jshevek 10y agoI assume you are suggesting you want to work on a tablet, or run pure Android on a laptop/desktop. The other interpretation of your words, given the topic of this article, is that you'd like IntelliJ on a Chromebook, so that: IntelliJ on Android + Android apps on Chromebooks brings IntelliJ to Chromebooks.
- genieyclo 10y agoAfter the Android Chrome app gets extensions, what's the point of keeping ChromeOS alive? It's the only thing Android's missing that ChromeOS has.
- huangwei_chang 10y agoI guess it's more about devices. Sometimes people do want to use laptop or devices with big screen and real keyboard.
- goda90 10y agoI think his point is they'll just become Android laptops.
- sangnoir 10y ago> It's the only thing Android's missing that ChromeOS has. Except for instant boot times, really paranoid security and a long list of supportive laptop OEMs
- azakai 10y agoAre those boot times still so good if the first apps you use are Android ones? That would be an apples-to-apples-comparison. If that's true, then I wonder why ChromeOS would boot up so much faster than Android? I suspect it doesn't.
- caffinatedmonk 10y agoI'm curious why they didn't mention something so game changing as this in the keynote.
- kzahel 10y agoManaging expectations, I think. Google tends to release early and with sometimes experimental products where the quality/UX is not super great. I expect this will have some rather rough edges.
- stinkytaco 10y agoThat doesn't stop them from announcing all sorts of things that have rough edges. Some of them keep their rough edges for years.
- untog 10y agoChromebooks in general don't seem to get that much attention. I'm not sure why, maybe they're not as ground-breaking as... another messaging app... that isn't even out yet...
- ljk 10y agoEveryone wants to be the only walled garden... https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoWhat game is this changing, really?
- kakarotoismygod 10y agoHaving offline apps is game changing because not everyone has access to the Internet all day long, and doing tasks like image and video editing on your laptop will be much easier and faster than using web services.
- hackaflocka 10y agoTo the Googlers on here -- any idea when it'll come to Chrome browser on other platforms. I really hope Google doesn't artificially delay that to boost Chrome OS penetration.
- eugeneionesco 10y agoWhat other platforms do you have in mind?
- hackaflocka 10y agoThe usual -- Windows, Mac, Linux. I use all 3.
- dmitrygr 10y agohttp://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/the-play-store-comes-to-chrome-os-but-not-the-way-we-were-expecting/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/the-play-store-comes-... "The new model dumps the native-client based implementation for an unmodified copy of the Android Framework running in a container." Will you run chrome as root on your other platforms so it can start a container?
- hackaflocka 10y agoHmm... good question... I'd be willing to do it, but not sure the vast majority out there will care to jump through the installation hoops required to do that.
- pritambaral 10y agoI wouldn't mind running chromium as root. Well, maybe a separate, small binary whose sole purpose is to manage the containers.
- koolba 10y agoWill apps run natively on Chromebooks or will my fart app slow down because it's being emulated?
- albasha 10y agoNatively. In most cases, faster than the phone version.
- exacube 10y agodefinitely slow farts (it is not emulated, but runs inside a linux container instead, so it won't have that emulation overhead)
- Symmetry 10y agoThere are both ARM and x86 chromebooks, there are both ARM and x86 Android phones. You need to have binaries for both and for Java apps that isn't even an issue. Of course there probably has to be some API translation but usually that isn't particularly slow.
- jimjimjim 10y agoyear of the linux desktop?
- zxcvcxz 10y agoWell it already dominates everything else. I realized every aspect of programming had me interfacing with a Linux system in some way and then decided to just make the switch. I was already using Android, RasPi, IoT devices, linux web servers, linux containers, linux in a VM on Windows, and I'd probably be trying to use "bash on windows" now if I still used Windows. I finally realized that Windows was just getting in the way and decided to get a Linux computer. Honestly using Windows is a much more painful experience than Linux at this point for me. But I'm not doing advanced document formatting like half the people on HN so I have the luxury to just get by with google docs.
- userbinator 10y agoIt's ironic that, despite its intrinsic openness, the biggest users of Linux are in the most closed ecosystems like smartphones/tablets, Chromebooks, various proprietary IoT devices, etc. where being open-source essentially means very little to the ease of users modifying, recompiling, and tweaking the software on them.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 10y agoNo, it is the year of the Java desktop.
- paride5745 10y agoCareful, Oracle might use this statement!
- pjmlp 10y agoGoogle could have avoided all this mess, if they have done it cleanly together with Sun, or bothered to buy them afterwards. There are quite a few commercial Java vendors with customized versions, like e.g. IS2T with MicroEJ that have licensing agreements in place. http://www.microej.com/ http://www.microej.com/ If Google loses the trial, they will be paying much more than they would have spent.
- ncr100 10y agoI assume Google IAB be supported on Chromebooks, too? Cross-device purchase restoration, etc?
- jbigelow76 10y agoI'd be more interested in seeing Electron apps on ChromeOS before Android apps, not expecting that to happen mind you, Electron on ChromeOS probably does nothing to move the Google ecosystem forward.
- izacus 10y agoI guess people want more than 45 minutes of battery out of their Chromebooks.
- old-gregg 10y agoCould not agree more. Electron apps do not feel like desktop apps at all, they're closer to VMs in how they start, how they stop and how much resources they require.
- pfg 10y agoNot to take anything away from your comment (I certainly agree that a lot of Electron apps perform significantly worse than their native counterparts), but I thought this statement was funny in this context given that we're comparing Electron apps to ones written in Java, which used to get the same kind of complaints.
- cozzyd 10y agoFor some reason that I do not care enough to figure out, the Slack "native" Linux application uses something like 5 GB of RAM on my desktop.
- city41 10y agoAre you certain it's Electron based? The OSX Slack app is built with MacGap.
- imtringued 10y agoMaybe it's time to upgrade your laptop /s
- chrisper 10y agoIs there a way to try out ChromeOS without owning a chromebook?
- Qerub 10y agoYes, with Neverware CloudReady: http://www.neverware.com/ http://www.neverware.com/
- jimmcslim 10y agoInteresting, can that be virtualised I wonder?
- newjersey 10y agoWhat would be the use case? Better sandboxing than what Chrome/Chromium provides? Im not trying to make a snarky comment. I'm curious what the use case is for you. Thanks
- Qerub 10y agoThey provide "unofficial" OVF files for VMware and VirtualBox: https://neverware.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/214564457-Un-Official-CloudReady-Virtual-Machine-Images- https://neverware.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/214564457-Un...
- gman99 10y agox86 builds: http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/ http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/ You can boot from USB and give it a whirl. There are some closed source bits missing, so I'm unsure if, for eg, netflix, will work. But it'll give you a feel for the OS
- jimmcslim 10y agoWhy are Chromebooks such a US phenomenon... Here in Australia retail availability is pretty dire. I wonder if this development might see that start to change?
- reustle 10y agoI don't think they are as successful in the state as you might think
- skuunk1 10y agoYou can get them on Kogan.com.au
- jimmcslim 10y agoOnly the mediocre ones it seems.
- skuunk1 10y agoBut I agree, they are hard to get here...
- babayega2 10y agoHere in Africa, they're are few given at tech events or bought by unknowingly parents to their kids. I got one which helped me to start my first job. Important thing is it's auto update.
- 10y ago
- spot 10y agofrom the post: > Schools in the US are now buying more Chromebooks than all other devices combined -- and in Q1 of this year, Chromebooks topped Macs in overall shipments to become the #2 most popular PC operating system in the US*. that's pretty amazing actually. congrats to google & the chromebook team!
- danso 10y agoPretty heartening too...for awhile, I was worried that computerized education would be limited to tablets.
- AckSyn 10y agoTablets aren't really a problem when it comes to education. It's only a shift in how we do computing vs what we do it in. They've built tablets. We (developers) need to build the software that does more than consume our time, but allow us to create the content for others. Sadly, it's not there yet, but in time it will be. I don't doubt the computing capacity is there for a company to create a 3D modeling program for a tablet that's either touch driven, or a combo that includes a mouse and/or keyboard. There are already suites out there for image manipulation, music and video creation etc. If I could purchase a tablet and then a full (3D) CAD or other modeling software for it, I'd drop the money in a heartbeat.
- om42 10y agoI don't really do much CAD but have lots of friends who do. Wouldn't you end up needing a keyboard and a mouse to be productive CADing on the tablet? Which would defeat the form factor of the tablet. There does seem to be a market for CADing on tablets as seen in Onshape. But I have never seen any of my friends use it (Mechanical engineering students and industry tends to favor SOLIDWORKS and sometimes CREO)
- AckSyn 10y agoIf the design of the CAD software were designed around the usage of a touch screen, and I don't think one would have to be constrained to require its use. I'm not saying they'd have to use the on-screen keyboard but build the interface to work well with a touch screen using what's already established in most programs (pinch, twist, tap and drag an item off a pallet or adjust its size etc).
- superobserver 10y agoThis is really great news and I hope they execute this right. As liberating as crouton is, I still find myself wanting an Android apps for the ease of access.
- dandare 10y agoFinally Sonos on Chromebook!
- _pmf_ 10y agoThere's virtually no app that I feel thrilled to use on my laptop.
- headmelted 10y agoFor anyone that hasn't yet played with a Chromebook and is interested in this, x86 builds of Chromium OS: http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/ http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/ This isn't exactly the same (no play store yet), but it'll let you get a feel for the OS and it's merits.
- pawelkomarnicki 10y agoWell, time to shred my "Samsung Chromebook", and maybe get something newer or just give up with this "gazillion of models and revisions" bullshit I hated about Windows years back :/
- dharma1 10y agoI hope they will open source this, so we would get Android apps on other Linux distros too. That would be a great win for Linux app ecosystem
- gvurrdon 10y agoDoes anyone know how permissions would be handled? There are some Android apps I'd like to install on a Chromebook but I certainly don't want them to get access to my contacts.