8 ms·

Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows

471 points by ProfDreamer 12y ago

cryptoz 12y ago
This is amazing. There's a long reddit thread and some additional instructions here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2gv035/you_can_now_run_android_apps_on_chrome_for/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2gv035/you_can_now_... From the README: > Soundcloud - Works, crashes when playing sound Funny definition of 'works'.
- benjamincburns 12y ago
  I experience the same thing with devs and 'done' all the time. "It's done; it just has some bugs that need fixing." To be fair, I've said this sentence myself in earnest several times.
  - hrktb 12y ago
    OTOH, software that has no bugs in need of fixing is usually not a realistic goal. You can say it will probably never be done, or you update your definition of "done" to "it has no bugs stopping a release". Personally I prefer the latter.
    - thejdude 12y ago
      From my experience the problem isn't the existence of bugs (like the existence of gravity), but the widespread occurrence of the cowboy programmer with very limited attention span. Often there are tons of TODO comments left in the code (including TODO comment this class), unit tests are non-existent, a simple smoke test will cause a null pointer exception or not even deploy, or they committed schema migration SQL scripts but did not change the entities/data objects corresponding to those tables so the - now mandatory - new columns cannot even be FILLED by the app. Stuff like that, that isn't DONE, it's deserving a punch in the face. OTOH, it may be symptomatic of our don't-blame culture that the consulting firm in question isn't fired on the spot or the much needed punch in the face isn't delivered. Those are days I wish we had US-American at-will employment and hire/fire culture.
    - benjamincburns 12y ago
      It almost always means "bugs blocking release" in my experience. Usually the sentence I quoted is developer speak for "it's framed out, and the core functionality has been shown to work under this scheme," or "all of the known-to-be-risky stuff is done and all that's left is tedium," or perhaps some cross between the two. It's not malicious. You could argue it's negligent, but I would only agree with that assessment if the Dev in question doesn't include the "it just has some bugs that need fixing" bit and is attempting to see what he/she can squeak by QA because he/she doesn't want to work on that thing anymore. Otherwise it just reflects the difference in focus between writing code and building a product.
- nnnnni 12y ago
  I guess that "works" just means "starts". That's like a winedb entry that says "game works" followed by "crashes after intro video"!
- vladikoff 12y ago
  Yeah Soundcloud is failing :( But Angry Birds works :)
AdmiralAsshat 12y ago
Neat proof of concept. I hope Google gets us something official sooner rather than later. It's a little disheartening that I own a Chromebook Pixel and yet I can't use Google's own hardware to design or test Android apps without installing Eclipse on a sideloaded Linux chroot via Crouton.
- tdicola 12y ago
  If you're a developer you'll want a real Linux environment anyways so I would just go the crouton route. I've been really happy with my C720 and crouton running Ubuntu.
  - throwred 12y ago
    You can go the full-installation route as well on C720: * Xubuntu https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/14/ https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/14/ * Ubuntu https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/12/ https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/12/
- jonursenbach 12y ago
  How is that disheartening? The whole point of the Chromebook is to only use the web.
  - AdmiralAsshat 12y ago
    The fact that Google is starting to roll out the ability for Android apps to run as Chrome apps suggests that they are aware of the limitations of being "web only". It also stands to reason that if they're going to soon allow Android apps to run under ChromeOS, you should be able to develop them too, no? To boot, the Pixel's relatively decent hardware, high-res display, and touchscreen just seem like it would be ideal for testing Android apps if it could be done natively. I doubt it will ever be as simple as I would like. But I can dream.
    - endtime 12y ago
      >It also stands to reason that if they're going to soon allow Android apps to run under ChromeOS, you should be able to develop them too, no? Why? Can you develop Android apps on your phone?
byuu 12y ago
Can anyone explain how this differs from using an Android emulator? (http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html) Is it a matter of features, speed, or convenience? Obviously, all of those can be overcome, be it as a fork of the official emulator or as a third-party emulator. For instance, this new Chrome extension must be the same thing under the hood: a Dalvik runtime, possibly an ARM->Intel recompiler for any NDK applications, etc. I figured the only reason this wasn't done to mass effect already was because it wasn't in demand. But if it's so desirable, surely creating an actual emulator would be superior to hacking up web browser extensions and ostensibly playing cat-and-mouse with Google over this?
- cryptoz 12y ago
  It's been a few years since I dared run the official emulator, and I used to have an underpowered computer for development, but last time it took about 10 minutes to boot Android and another 2-3 minutes to open an app. I presume it's been improved since then and runs nicer on better hardware, but my first impulse is that speed is a huge concern in Android emulation. Convenience only matters if speed is solved, but then it becomes huge.
  - umsm 12y ago
    I don't know if anything changed within the past 2 years, but I had a high-end system 2.5 years ago where the emulator was just as slow as you describe it.
    - IgorPartola 12y ago
      It's still dog slow on a high end MacBook Pro (2012 model).
  - vamur 12y ago
    The official emulator is so slow it's a joke. Genymotion or Intel HAXM are a bit better but the whole process is clunky. Once Google introduces Android runtime to Chrome, developing for Android should become much easier.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kasabali 12y ago
I will absolutely go nuts if this thing manages to run OneNote on my Debian desktop.
- ryanmarsh 12y ago
  Please don't downvote this. What is on debian today that you can't get on or don't like about OSX? I ask this as a former Linux die hard. What am I missing back in the Linux world these days? Also, One Note is killer isn't it? It is so much nicer than Evernote. I've loved One Note ever since the first time it shipped with Office. It's so great to see Microsoft porting their better apps to other platforms.
  - choffman 12y ago
    |What is on debian today that you can't get on or don't like about OSX? Freedom.
  - kasabali 12y ago
    I can't (easily and reliably) get OS X to run on my non-Mac computer while Debian runs like a champion, this is what's missing from OS X :) Otherwise I would like to try it seriously as my main OS if I get a chance in the future. Heck, I even used Windows 7/8 for a few years and even they get good enough after installing Cygwin, so I can't think of any showstoppers that would make me dislike OS X. (Well, lack of the vast apt repository may be a problem, but they say very good things about homebrew and MacPorts, so this wouldn't be an issue I guess.) I was a heavy OneNote user in Windows and accumulated a lot of stuff in it, so after coming back to Debian, I desperately tried running it in Wine and also tried the Web version but unfortunately they didn't cut it. Currently I use CherryTree[0] and it gets the job done but it's very far away from the OneNote experience. [0] http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/ http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/
    - ryanmarsh 12y ago
      If you have an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard OneNote is great on iOS. Also, thanks for the link to Cherry Tree. It looks cool.
bmelton 12y ago
So, now we can write apps in Angular that run on the web and compile to Java so that we can install them to Android, running on ChromeOS, running on OSX. Brilliant. Edit: Perhaps the punny nature of this is deserving of downvotes, but the statement above is the actual use case I presented to a co-developer, discussing how this project could be of use to our app, which was built with Ionic. FWIW, there's value in it (the app, not necessarily this post) even if it means having to unplug fewer devices to swap them out with different devices to test.
- ode 12y ago
  https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
asadotzler 12y ago
Java makes a triumphant comeback in the browser?
oldgun 12y ago
This is amazing. I hope Google could really carry this project as far as possible. The next several major issues would be polishing up the platform, eliminating the bugs, unifying the android and chromebook development interface. Think of one day when android developers could actually design apps for the desktop. How cool would that be? That's when Microsoft should really get worried.
tracker1 12y ago
Hope this means good netflix support in Linux.
- tkubacki 12y ago
  Netflix should work on Linux natively (at least in Ubuntu) very soon http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/09/netflix-linux-html5-nss-change-request http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/09/netflix-linux-html5-nss-c...
chj 12y ago
Google needs to do this.
sohilv 12y ago
Works amazingly. Can someone share, how does it works internally ?
stuaxo 12y ago
Its about bloody time!
em3rgent0rdr 12y ago
Awesome! Works for me on arch linux running latest chromium. Much faster than running android emulator!
bussiere 12y ago
Fuuuuu Out There a good game only available on mobile crash with this solution ... Dam but it looks full of promise i hope one day it will work well ...
bla2 12y ago
Interesting, Google announced working on this on this year's I/O and posted the first apps just one week ago ( http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-set-of-android-apps-coming-to.html http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-set-of-android-apps... ).
niutech 12y ago
Running Android apps in Chrome on desktop is huge! I'm glad that the ARC runtime I provided in https://github.com/vladikoff/chromeos-apk/issues/5 https://github.com/vladikoff/chromeos-apk/issues/5 helped to achieve this.
- ode 12y ago
  #humblebrag
kyrrewk 12y ago
I have had some success running Android x86 (http://www.android-x86.org/ http://www.android-x86.org/) in VirtualBox.
mattfrommars 12y ago
How is this really good? Android apps are really good but they are designed for touch interface on mobile devices, not desktop.
- AlexeyBrin 12y ago
  A lot of new laptops of today have touch screens displays, this trend will only grow in the future.
mjcohen 12y ago
Want Open Office!
wzsddtc 12y ago
We worked with the ARC team at Vine as a launch partner, there were 0 modifications that we had to do to get it working on ARC. The only difference was that the "bugs" we had to fix were all reproducible on Nexus devices as well BUT the threading model had to be more strict on ARC in terms accessing system resources.
Flenser 12y ago
could you use this to run ChromiumTestShell.apk on windows for testing android chrome rendering? [1] http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-continuous/index.html?prefix=Android/ http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-con...

471 points by ProfDreamer 12y ago

This is amazing. There's a long reddit thread and some additional instructions here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2gv035/you_can_now_run_android_apps_on_chrome_for/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2gv035/you_can_now_... From the README: > Soundcloud - Works, crashes when playing sound Funny definition of 'works'.

benjamincburns 12y ago
I experience the same thing with devs and 'done' all the time. "It's done; it just has some bugs that need fixing." To be fair, I've said this sentence myself in earnest several times.
- hrktb 12y ago
  OTOH, software that has no bugs in need of fixing is usually not a realistic goal. You can say it will probably never be done, or you update your definition of "done" to "it has no bugs stopping a release". Personally I prefer the latter.
  - thejdude 12y ago
    From my experience the problem isn't the existence of bugs (like the existence of gravity), but the widespread occurrence of the cowboy programmer with very limited attention span. Often there are tons of TODO comments left in the code (including TODO comment this class), unit tests are non-existent, a simple smoke test will cause a null pointer exception or not even deploy, or they committed schema migration SQL scripts but did not change the entities/data objects corresponding to those tables so the - now mandatory - new columns cannot even be FILLED by the app. Stuff like that, that isn't DONE, it's deserving a punch in the face. OTOH, it may be symptomatic of our don't-blame culture that the consulting firm in question isn't fired on the spot or the much needed punch in the face isn't delivered. Those are days I wish we had US-American at-will employment and hire/fire culture.
  - benjamincburns 12y ago
    It almost always means "bugs blocking release" in my experience. Usually the sentence I quoted is developer speak for "it's framed out, and the core functionality has been shown to work under this scheme," or "all of the known-to-be-risky stuff is done and all that's left is tedium," or perhaps some cross between the two. It's not malicious. You could argue it's negligent, but I would only agree with that assessment if the Dev in question doesn't include the "it just has some bugs that need fixing" bit and is attempting to see what he/she can squeak by QA because he/she doesn't want to work on that thing anymore. Otherwise it just reflects the difference in focus between writing code and building a product.
nnnnni 12y ago
I guess that "works" just means "starts". That's like a winedb entry that says "game works" followed by "crashes after intro video"!
vladikoff 12y ago
Yeah Soundcloud is failing :( But Angry Birds works :)

AdmiralAsshat 12y ago

Neat proof of concept. I hope Google gets us something official sooner rather than later. It's a little disheartening that I own a Chromebook Pixel and yet I can't use Google's own hardware to design or test Android apps without installing Eclipse on a sideloaded Linux chroot via Crouton.

tdicola 12y ago
If you're a developer you'll want a real Linux environment anyways so I would just go the crouton route. I've been really happy with my C720 and crouton running Ubuntu.
- throwred 12y ago
  You can go the full-installation route as well on C720: * Xubuntu https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/14/ https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/14/ * Ubuntu https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/12/ https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/12/
jonursenbach 12y ago
How is that disheartening? The whole point of the Chromebook is to only use the web.
- AdmiralAsshat 12y ago
  The fact that Google is starting to roll out the ability for Android apps to run as Chrome apps suggests that they are aware of the limitations of being "web only". It also stands to reason that if they're going to soon allow Android apps to run under ChromeOS, you should be able to develop them too, no? To boot, the Pixel's relatively decent hardware, high-res display, and touchscreen just seem like it would be ideal for testing Android apps if it could be done natively. I doubt it will ever be as simple as I would like. But I can dream.
  - endtime 12y ago
    >It also stands to reason that if they're going to soon allow Android apps to run under ChromeOS, you should be able to develop them too, no? Why? Can you develop Android apps on your phone?

byuu 12y ago

Can anyone explain how this differs from using an Android emulator? (http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html) Is it a matter of features, speed, or convenience? Obviously, all of those can be overcome, be it as a fork of the official emulator or as a third-party emulator. For instance, this new Chrome extension must be the same thing under the hood: a Dalvik runtime, possibly an ARM->Intel recompiler for any NDK applications, etc. I figured the only reason this wasn't done to mass effect already was because it wasn't in demand. But if it's so desirable, surely creating an actual emulator would be superior to hacking up web browser extensions and ostensibly playing cat-and-mouse with Google over this?

cryptoz 12y ago
It's been a few years since I dared run the official emulator, and I used to have an underpowered computer for development, but last time it took about 10 minutes to boot Android and another 2-3 minutes to open an app. I presume it's been improved since then and runs nicer on better hardware, but my first impulse is that speed is a huge concern in Android emulation. Convenience only matters if speed is solved, but then it becomes huge.
- umsm 12y ago
  I don't know if anything changed within the past 2 years, but I had a high-end system 2.5 years ago where the emulator was just as slow as you describe it.
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    It's still dog slow on a high end MacBook Pro (2012 model).
- vamur 12y ago
  The official emulator is so slow it's a joke. Genymotion or Intel HAXM are a bit better but the whole process is clunky. Once Google introduces Android runtime to Chrome, developing for Android should become much easier.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kasabali 12y ago

I will absolutely go nuts if this thing manages to run OneNote on my Debian desktop.

ryanmarsh 12y ago
Please don't downvote this. What is on debian today that you can't get on or don't like about OSX? I ask this as a former Linux die hard. What am I missing back in the Linux world these days? Also, One Note is killer isn't it? It is so much nicer than Evernote. I've loved One Note ever since the first time it shipped with Office. It's so great to see Microsoft porting their better apps to other platforms.
- choffman 12y ago
  |What is on debian today that you can't get on or don't like about OSX? Freedom.
- kasabali 12y ago
  I can't (easily and reliably) get OS X to run on my non-Mac computer while Debian runs like a champion, this is what's missing from OS X :) Otherwise I would like to try it seriously as my main OS if I get a chance in the future. Heck, I even used Windows 7/8 for a few years and even they get good enough after installing Cygwin, so I can't think of any showstoppers that would make me dislike OS X. (Well, lack of the vast apt repository may be a problem, but they say very good things about homebrew and MacPorts, so this wouldn't be an issue I guess.) I was a heavy OneNote user in Windows and accumulated a lot of stuff in it, so after coming back to Debian, I desperately tried running it in Wine and also tried the Web version but unfortunately they didn't cut it. Currently I use CherryTree[0] and it gets the job done but it's very far away from the OneNote experience. [0] http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/ http://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/
  - ryanmarsh 12y ago
    If you have an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard OneNote is great on iOS. Also, thanks for the link to Cherry Tree. It looks cool.

bmelton 12y ago

So, now we can write apps in Angular that run on the web and compile to Java so that we can install them to Android, running on ChromeOS, running on OSX. Brilliant. Edit: Perhaps the punny nature of this is deserving of downvotes, but the statement above is the actual use case I presented to a co-developer, discussing how this project could be of use to our app, which was built with Ionic. FWIW, there's value in it (the app, not necessarily this post) even if it means having to unplug fewer devices to swap them out with different devices to test.

ode 12y ago
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

asadotzler 12y ago

Java makes a triumphant comeback in the browser?

oldgun 12y ago

This is amazing. I hope Google could really carry this project as far as possible. The next several major issues would be polishing up the platform, eliminating the bugs, unifying the android and chromebook development interface. Think of one day when android developers could actually design apps for the desktop. How cool would that be? That's when Microsoft should really get worried.

tracker1 12y ago

Hope this means good netflix support in Linux.

tkubacki 12y ago
Netflix should work on Linux natively (at least in Ubuntu) very soon http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/09/netflix-linux-html5-nss-change-request http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/09/netflix-linux-html5-nss-c...

chj 12y ago

Google needs to do this.

sohilv 12y ago

Works amazingly. Can someone share, how does it works internally ?

stuaxo 12y ago

Its about bloody time!

em3rgent0rdr 12y ago

Awesome! Works for me on arch linux running latest chromium. Much faster than running android emulator!

bussiere 12y ago

Fuuuuu Out There a good game only available on mobile crash with this solution ... Dam but it looks full of promise i hope one day it will work well ...

bla2 12y ago

Interesting, Google announced working on this on this year's I/O and posted the first apps just one week ago ( http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-set-of-android-apps-coming-to.html http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-set-of-android-apps... ).

niutech 12y ago

Running Android apps in Chrome on desktop is huge! I'm glad that the ARC runtime I provided in https://github.com/vladikoff/chromeos-apk/issues/5 https://github.com/vladikoff/chromeos-apk/issues/5 helped to achieve this.

ode 12y ago
#humblebrag

kyrrewk 12y ago

I have had some success running Android x86 (http://www.android-x86.org/ http://www.android-x86.org/) in VirtualBox.

mattfrommars 12y ago

How is this really good? Android apps are really good but they are designed for touch interface on mobile devices, not desktop.

AlexeyBrin 12y ago
A lot of new laptops of today have touch screens displays, this trend will only grow in the future.

mjcohen 12y ago

Want Open Office!

wzsddtc 12y ago

We worked with the ARC team at Vine as a launch partner, there were 0 modifications that we had to do to get it working on ARC. The only difference was that the "bugs" we had to fix were all reproducible on Nexus devices as well BUT the threading model had to be more strict on ARC in terms accessing system resources.

Flenser 12y ago

could you use this to run ChromiumTestShell.apk on windows for testing android chrome rendering? [1] http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-continuous/index.html?prefix=Android/ http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-con...