10 ms·

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome

by MarkMc 10y ago

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a limited, buggy way [1]. If Google had put meaningful effort into developing such a strategy we would by now have a relatively simple way to develop software which runs on 99% of laptops and 85% of smartphones and tablets. Developers would now be targeting 'Android first' instead of 'web app first then iOS then maybe Android'. Sundar, if you're reading this - do it! [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/hack-runs-android-apps-on-windows-mac-and-linux-computers/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/hack-runs-android-ap...

bitmapbrother 10y ago
The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser.
- foota 10y ago
  Maybe I'm just jaded from downloading video games, but, at least on a landline, I don't think most people would care?
  - ghostly_s 10y ago
    For people who've already committed to Chrome, it might just be a one-time annoyance. But the time when Chrome had an seeming lock on the top seat in the browser wars has come and gone. I can definitely see this hurting new adoption, which would rightly make Google nervous.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    It could make sense as an optional download if you do want Android support. But, Google would never increase the download size of their browser to that extent.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  With Chrome, people could let Chrome download it for them in the background.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser. So, divide up by services, and download only the services needed by installed apps with the first app that needs them. Adds basically nothing to the browser install.
- iwintermute 10y ago
  My Realtek sound drivers for PC were around 450 MB (!!!). Nvidia drivers are around 350 MB and update quite frequently. That's insane. And Chrome has great update mechanism.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Yeah, but you were also downloading the whole "Experience Apps" on top of the drivers.
mark242 10y ago
Sun tried that, back in the day. Maybe you heard about Java applets, maybe you didn't. They were the slowest thing about the web, insecure even with a sandbox, and just an overall pain. Short of having a jvm always running on your machine, the performance of Android-via-Chrome will completely turn people off the Android ecosystem.
- MarkMc 10y ago
  Sun's execution was poor. Google's doesn't have to be.
  - justicezyx 10y ago
    Eric Schmit come from Sun...
    - detaro 10y ago
      Why would that have any relevance at all?
      - gonzo 10y ago
        Because he wasn't that good at Sun. (I was there.)
        bitL 10y ago
        Satya Nadella came from Sun as well ;-)
        detaro 10y ago
        Somehow I doubt that he'd be involved in a hypothetical android-on-chrome below maybe a go/no-go decision.
- josefx 10y ago
  I remember two issues with Java Applets: * Java itself was slow for a long time * The Browser would hang while loading an Applet The first is no longer an issue. They can just use a modern just in time compiler and it wont run slower than Java on Android. Chrome already has one to deal with JavaScript powered Web 2.0 applications. The second was as far as I can tell an API issue. Applets would block everything by default until they were loaded. A really bad idea in a single threaded environment when you had to send several MB over low bandwidth and the JVM itself took long to start. Just making the load async with a completion callback could have solved this issue and I remember a few Applets that actually used an async download to reduce the hang.
therealmarv 10y ago
You're forgetting something: This will not work for iOS. Why develop something which excludes a big chunk of the cake? I'm happy Google is not going this way... Apple is doing already enough damage with exclusive features.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  You mean the future holders of 8% of the market across all form factors?
- tuxracer 10y ago
  > This will not work for iOS. Why develop something which excludes a big chunk of the cake? By that logic nobody should even create native Android apps today. You're saying that if Android apps could run on even more platforms it would somehow stop being worth it to create them because iOS is excluded? Makes absolutely zero sense.
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    I would also go even further and would say it makes in MOST cases no sense to develop a purely native app today. From a economic standpoint most native, one platform apps make no sense nowadays (also many people are unwilling to install more apps) unless you have deep enough pockets. I'm happy that Chrome embraces the web and pushes web application even further. I see really no benefit in running Android apps on my Mac (this results in mixed touchscreen, non touchscreen experience). So Chrome is pushing technology for this 80-90% of devices but it is not Android (with its touchscreen focus) and I'm really happy it is the web which I can use on more devices with different UX handling and without installing stuff.
iced0wn 10y ago
In my opinion, android and its accompanying apps are simply a book google intends to shelf. A fresh OS for devices that had chrome as an app and its android hornet behind it would make a bunch more sense. Pushing the jvm kart is similar to something like bowser vs Yoshi
yoz-y 10y ago
Would android apps be a good fit for desktop? Most of them do not even work well on a tablet and I think they would scale very badly to even touchscreen laptops. I doubt that most developers would do any effort to have their apps "responsive".
- lupin_sansei 10y ago
  Many of them would make great desktop widget kind of apps, such a mini music player, or weather app.
- lmm 10y ago
  I wish I could run the Trello app on my touchscreen laptop, if only so I could drag cards to the top to archive them (for some reason the web UI doesn't offer that). I wish I could get Google's suggested pages there. And for a lot of Amazon's apps, the Windows version feels like an out-of-date port of the Android version where I'd be better off running the Android version.
goldenchrome 10y ago
Phones and desktops are completely different form factors with different constraints. Running an Android app on Windows would be a horrible experience.
- flukus 10y ago
  Just fire up windows 10 and install something from the app store for an example of why the convergence makes no sense.
- MarkMc 10y ago
  I'm not saying that the app would have exactly the same UI on a phone and a desktop computer - the developer is free to customise the UI for the device.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Most of them already fail to do so for tablets, why would that change?
    - MarkMc 10y ago
      'Most' apps do not get used even once [1] so their user experience doesn't really matter. Most popular apps are designed for both tablet and phone. The ones that haven't specifically been designed for tablet are usually basic things like Guitar Tuner or Flashlight which don't suffer much from having a phone layout on a tablet. Sure, you will still sometimes encounter a crappy app which has a horrible user experience on your device - similar to web pages and webapps which assume you have a 24-inch display - but not often enough for users to avoid the platform. [1] http://www.phonearena.com/news/400000-apps-in-the-App-Store-have-never-been-downloaded-says-report_id32943 http://www.phonearena.com/news/400000-apps-in-the-App-Store-...
  - flukus 10y ago
    At that point it's less complicated to have multiple apps than a single all form factors one.
- 10y ago
sandGorgon 10y ago
+100 This would have been the way to build Linux into the next great desktop platform. I dont think people mind a 1GB Chrome runtime if it opens up a billion apps for them. I think apps can be handled well by both browser and mobile phones. Considering that ART runtime also JIT compiles the java code to native, performance should also not be a worry.
pryelluw 10y ago
I worked with a company that was part of the beta for ARC Welder and it was a very experimental product experience. Things were hit or miss on chromebooks. Support from Google engineers was amazing though.
espeed 10y ago
Google has Chromebooks securely locked down, down to the hardware crypto -- there may be (speculating) inherent security issues with running mobile apps in the browser when you can't lock down the external environment.
rimantas 10y ago
Tell me, why would I want to run Android app on Mac?
- officialjunk 10y ago
  The fact that it is an android app doesn't really matter. Your question becomes essentially "why would I want to run any app on Mac?" which I think you can figure out the answer to.
lupin_sansei 10y ago
There are products that already allow the running of Android apps on Windows: http://www.greenbot.com/article/3129740/android/the-best-programs-to-run-android-apps-on-your-windows-pc.html http://www.greenbot.com/article/3129740/android/the-best-pro... I've never tried it or seen anyone do it though.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  Well, it's mostly emulation, with some paravirtualization on top. Not wonderful, but recently it's gotten at least bearable.
fvinci 10y ago
Does anyone think this is where they are going with Angular?
sedatk 10y ago
Android is already dominant on mobile. Desktop market is shrinking. "Running" doesn't correlate to a good experience. Google probably thinks about that stuff.
- MarkMc 10y ago
  Actually the PC market has stopped shrinking and is now about steady: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3468817 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3468817 'Running' can be pretty good, even when it's not a native app - there are plenty of successful web apps, including a few written by Google.
voidr 10y ago
I don't think we really need another locked down OS where the vendor will control everything. The other issue I have is that I don't see Android apps as efficient way of getting my work done, applications that don't need to worry about the mobile form factor will most of the time offer a superior user experience. You already have a 99% cross platform way to ship an app, you can create a web app.
voidr 10y ago
I don't think we really need another locked down OS where the vendor will control everything. The other issue I have is that I don't see Android apps as efficient way of getting my work done, applications that don't need to worry about the mobile form factor will most of the time offer a superior user experience. You already have a 99% cross platform way to ship an app, you can create a web app.
iso-8859-1 10y ago
There was a talk at the X Developers Conference 2016 about the ARC (App Runtime for Chrome). Seems like it is still being developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PflCyiULO4&t=2h10m50s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PflCyiULO4&t=2h10m50s
nialv7 10y ago
> have a relatively simple way to develop software which runs on 99% of laptops and 85% of smartphones and tablets. We already do. It's called a webpage.
- ferdbold 10y ago
  You could argue that webpages were never meant to host the kind of rich experiences and workflows native applications are known for. We just made it that way through years and years of momentum.

by MarkMc 10y ago

bitmapbrother 10y ago

The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser.

foota 10y ago
Maybe I'm just jaded from downloading video games, but, at least on a landline, I don't think most people would care?
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  For people who've already committed to Chrome, it might just be a one-time annoyance. But the time when Chrome had an seeming lock on the top seat in the browser wars has come and gone. I can definitely see this hurting new adoption, which would rightly make Google nervous.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  It could make sense as an optional download if you do want Android support. But, Google would never increase the download size of their browser to that extent.
stcredzero 10y ago
With Chrome, people could let Chrome download it for them in the background.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> The amount of additional code required to support Android apps on the Chrome browser would be far too great. No one wants to download a 500MB+ browser. So, divide up by services, and download only the services needed by installed apps with the first app that needs them. Adds basically nothing to the browser install.
iwintermute 10y ago
My Realtek sound drivers for PC were around 450 MB (!!!). Nvidia drivers are around 350 MB and update quite frequently. That's insane. And Chrome has great update mechanism.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Yeah, but you were also downloading the whole "Experience Apps" on top of the drivers.

mark242 10y ago

Sun tried that, back in the day. Maybe you heard about Java applets, maybe you didn't. They were the slowest thing about the web, insecure even with a sandbox, and just an overall pain. Short of having a jvm always running on your machine, the performance of Android-via-Chrome will completely turn people off the Android ecosystem.

MarkMc 10y ago
Sun's execution was poor. Google's doesn't have to be.
- justicezyx 10y ago
  Eric Schmit come from Sun...
  - detaro 10y ago
    Why would that have any relevance at all?
    - gonzo 10y ago
      Because he wasn't that good at Sun. (I was there.)
      - bitL 10y ago
        Satya Nadella came from Sun as well ;-)
      - detaro 10y ago
        Somehow I doubt that he'd be involved in a hypothetical android-on-chrome below maybe a go/no-go decision.
josefx 10y ago
I remember two issues with Java Applets: * Java itself was slow for a long time * The Browser would hang while loading an Applet The first is no longer an issue. They can just use a modern just in time compiler and it wont run slower than Java on Android. Chrome already has one to deal with JavaScript powered Web 2.0 applications. The second was as far as I can tell an API issue. Applets would block everything by default until they were loaded. A really bad idea in a single threaded environment when you had to send several MB over low bandwidth and the JVM itself took long to start. Just making the load async with a completion callback could have solved this issue and I remember a few Applets that actually used an async download to reduce the hang.

therealmarv 10y ago

You're forgetting something: This will not work for iOS. Why develop something which excludes a big chunk of the cake? I'm happy Google is not going this way... Apple is doing already enough damage with exclusive features.

michaelmrose 10y ago
You mean the future holders of 8% of the market across all form factors?
tuxracer 10y ago
> This will not work for iOS. Why develop something which excludes a big chunk of the cake? By that logic nobody should even create native Android apps today. You're saying that if Android apps could run on even more platforms it would somehow stop being worth it to create them because iOS is excluded? Makes absolutely zero sense.
- therealmarv 10y ago
  I would also go even further and would say it makes in MOST cases no sense to develop a purely native app today. From a economic standpoint most native, one platform apps make no sense nowadays (also many people are unwilling to install more apps) unless you have deep enough pockets. I'm happy that Chrome embraces the web and pushes web application even further. I see really no benefit in running Android apps on my Mac (this results in mixed touchscreen, non touchscreen experience). So Chrome is pushing technology for this 80-90% of devices but it is not Android (with its touchscreen focus) and I'm really happy it is the web which I can use on more devices with different UX handling and without installing stuff.

iced0wn 10y ago

In my opinion, android and its accompanying apps are simply a book google intends to shelf. A fresh OS for devices that had chrome as an app and its android hornet behind it would make a bunch more sense. Pushing the jvm kart is similar to something like bowser vs Yoshi

yoz-y 10y ago

Would android apps be a good fit for desktop? Most of them do not even work well on a tablet and I think they would scale very badly to even touchscreen laptops. I doubt that most developers would do any effort to have their apps "responsive".

lupin_sansei 10y ago
Many of them would make great desktop widget kind of apps, such a mini music player, or weather app.
lmm 10y ago
I wish I could run the Trello app on my touchscreen laptop, if only so I could drag cards to the top to archive them (for some reason the web UI doesn't offer that). I wish I could get Google's suggested pages there. And for a lot of Amazon's apps, the Windows version feels like an out-of-date port of the Android version where I'd be better off running the Android version.

goldenchrome 10y ago

Phones and desktops are completely different form factors with different constraints. Running an Android app on Windows would be a horrible experience.

flukus 10y ago
Just fire up windows 10 and install something from the app store for an example of why the convergence makes no sense.
MarkMc 10y ago
I'm not saying that the app would have exactly the same UI on a phone and a desktop computer - the developer is free to customise the UI for the device.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Most of them already fail to do so for tablets, why would that change?
  - MarkMc 10y ago
    'Most' apps do not get used even once [1] so their user experience doesn't really matter. Most popular apps are designed for both tablet and phone. The ones that haven't specifically been designed for tablet are usually basic things like Guitar Tuner or Flashlight which don't suffer much from having a phone layout on a tablet. Sure, you will still sometimes encounter a crappy app which has a horrible user experience on your device - similar to web pages and webapps which assume you have a 24-inch display - but not often enough for users to avoid the platform. [1] http://www.phonearena.com/news/400000-apps-in-the-App-Store-have-never-been-downloaded-says-report_id32943 http://www.phonearena.com/news/400000-apps-in-the-App-Store-...
- flukus 10y ago
  At that point it's less complicated to have multiple apps than a single all form factors one.
10y ago

sandGorgon 10y ago

+100 This would have been the way to build Linux into the next great desktop platform. I dont think people mind a 1GB Chrome runtime if it opens up a billion apps for them. I think apps can be handled well by both browser and mobile phones. Considering that ART runtime also JIT compiles the java code to native, performance should also not be a worry.

pryelluw 10y ago

I worked with a company that was part of the beta for ARC Welder and it was a very experimental product experience. Things were hit or miss on chromebooks. Support from Google engineers was amazing though.

espeed 10y ago

Google has Chromebooks securely locked down, down to the hardware crypto -- there may be (speculating) inherent security issues with running mobile apps in the browser when you can't lock down the external environment.

rimantas 10y ago

Tell me, why would I want to run Android app on Mac?

officialjunk 10y ago
The fact that it is an android app doesn't really matter. Your question becomes essentially "why would I want to run any app on Mac?" which I think you can figure out the answer to.

lupin_sansei 10y ago

There are products that already allow the running of Android apps on Windows: http://www.greenbot.com/article/3129740/android/the-best-programs-to-run-android-apps-on-your-windows-pc.html http://www.greenbot.com/article/3129740/android/the-best-pro... I've never tried it or seen anyone do it though.

Piskvorrr 10y ago
Well, it's mostly emulation, with some paravirtualization on top. Not wonderful, but recently it's gotten at least bearable.

fvinci 10y ago

Does anyone think this is where they are going with Angular?

sedatk 10y ago

Android is already dominant on mobile. Desktop market is shrinking. "Running" doesn't correlate to a good experience. Google probably thinks about that stuff.

MarkMc 10y ago
Actually the PC market has stopped shrinking and is now about steady: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3468817 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3468817 'Running' can be pretty good, even when it's not a native app - there are plenty of successful web apps, including a few written by Google.

voidr 10y ago

I don't think we really need another locked down OS where the vendor will control everything. The other issue I have is that I don't see Android apps as efficient way of getting my work done, applications that don't need to worry about the mobile form factor will most of the time offer a superior user experience. You already have a 99% cross platform way to ship an app, you can create a web app.

voidr 10y ago

iso-8859-1 10y ago

There was a talk at the X Developers Conference 2016 about the ARC (App Runtime for Chrome). Seems like it is still being developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PflCyiULO4&t=2h10m50s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PflCyiULO4&t=2h10m50s

nialv7 10y ago

> have a relatively simple way to develop software which runs on 99% of laptops and 85% of smartphones and tablets. We already do. It's called a webpage.

ferdbold 10y ago
You could argue that webpages were never meant to host the kind of rich experiences and workflows native applications are known for. We just made it that way through years and years of momentum.