Google first brought the ability to run Android apps on Chrome OS with a project called the “App Runtime for Chrome (ARC).” Google built an Android runtime on Chrome OS and partnered with select developers to port a handful of Android apps. Now it sounds like Google is ready to unleash millions of Android apps onto the platform by bringing the entire Play Store to Chrome OS.
This is great news, because the more exposure Android applications get to the proper desktop world, the more developers will take that into account when developing Android applications. We need these applications to become properly resizable to prepare them for the future of the desktop/laptop Android Google claimed it’s working on.
In addition, it makes Chrome OS – which is going to be phased out in the process – a lot more useful.
I’ve shelved my Chromebook for a while not because it’s a bad machine, but because I just can’t do enough with it. Might be time to dig it out again.
Depending on your model, you might have some luck flashing the BIOS with SeaBios, an open source BIOS project. Visit https://johnlewis.ie/ for precompiled versions for many Chromebooks.
It worked for me, I got rid of the hard to update Chrubuntu an the tedious Crouton. You can install any Linux distribution after the upgrade.
Most of them already have nice open source SeaBIOS (or open source uBoot for the ARM devices) on there. All you need to do is get into dev mode and change the default first boot device.
Edited 2016-04-26 04:02 UTC
So when an OS like Chrome OS just got the addition of the Play Store….the conclusion is that it is going to be phased out?
Shouldn’t the (also incorrect) conclusion be that Android would be the OS that is going to be phased out?
But let’s not speculate, lets do a simple search and …oh look at that…. https://chrome.googleblog.com/2015/11/chrome-os-is-here-to-stay.html
ChromeOS is long-term going to be phased out. Those end of 2015 denials by Google are just backtracking before the holiday season so as not to undercut Chromebook sales. The process will take a few years (current Chromebooks will receive support until 2020), but mid to long-term, Android devices will start to replace Chromebooks.
The next major Android release will have multiwindow support. Not just split screen multitasking, but free-form floating windows (http://www.droid-life.com/2016/03/21/android-n-has-a-freeform-deskt…). Google’s newest tablet, the Pixel C, was famously a Chrome OS device until it was changed over to Android at the last possible minute, with underlying ChromeOS bits remaining which makes it extremely hard to develop custom ROMs (http://forum.xda-developers.com/pixel-c/general/pixel-c-rant-develo…). The Chrome browser itself is losing its app launcher later this year (http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/22/11287450/chrome-app-launcher-bein…).
All signs point to the sunset of ChromeOS. That doesn’t mean that a $200 Chromebook is a bad deal today — we’re still talking 5 years at a minimum before it is dropped. But its pretty clear that Android is the future for Google. When that 2016 Chromebook is long in the tooth and needs replacing, it will be a touchscreen Android device that replaces it.
No, there are many signs, like ChromeOS about to be able to run Android apps and official statements that you just choose to ignore. Nothing is pretty clear, and that device might just be a touchscreen Chrome OS.
Chrome OS is a faster, more secure, more reliable OS at the moment. It is also entirely focused on the web, where Google likes things to be.
Android is the more popular platform with all the apps, but the apps and storage run on the device which is not Googly at all.
Of course these two platforms are converging and we are starting to see the signs of that now. But to me it makes more sense to have Chrome OS as the OS and ART on top.
Edited 2016-04-25 16:42 UTC
And at the same time going with the transition from Dalvic/Java to Swift PL.
Maybe Chrome OS will eventually vanish – like many other operating systems have. This is unlikely to be before 2020 – the earliest end-of-life date for the Google Pixel 2 which was launched in 2015. And if Google launches a Pixel 3 during 2017, then this will confirm a long-term commitment to Chrome OS!
The App-Launcher is being removed from the Linux, OS X, and Windows based Chrome browsers….yet remains in Chrome OS. Could this indicate Google believing that Chrome OS has matured sufficiently to stand on its own and should get the best bells and whistles?
The Chromebooks have a dominant market share in the education market. By the time the current primary/secondary school students graduate and start purchasing their own gadgets, they will be more familiar with Chrome OS than OS X and Windows. The students who explored the Linux underpinning of Chrome OS will probably be tempted by Linux boxes or notebooks once adults.
As for phones and tablets, it will be either Android or iOS – depending on previous use and their social status at that time. Frankly, this does not bode well for the future of Blackberry and Windows based mobile devices.
One thing though, the high end Chromebooks such as the Google Pixel and the Dell Chromebooks for Work have a touch screen. Few apps developed for Chrome OS appear to be supporting a touch interface – likely because the Chromebooks for School don`t have a touch screen. Enabling Android apps on Chrome OS might be a strategy to close expectations gaps – though for those will to purchase high end Chromebooks.
The Pixel C is a bit of a misfit at this point in time. Based on the tablet format and with an optional keyboard, it cannot be considered a Chromebook. Was the initial intent to provide a touch interface based Chrome OS development device?
I agree, that’s an odd conclusion. Chrome and Android share a lot of the same underpinnings, being both based on Linux. A desktop needs to have more functionality and freedom IMHO than a mobile device. It therefor makes sense for Google to keep Chrome OS around, add Android’s sub systems to expand it’s successful app store onto the laptop/desktop and build from there. Maybe we’ll even see some ChromeOS specific apps (like Android Studio) start to appear in the app store.
This same strategy would make sense for Apple too – though they really should integrate their app stores (they reversed course on larger iPhones, they can also reverse course on touch screen laptops/convertibles – maybe they are waiting on AMD?).
I do wonder whether that particular part of the summary was more badly expressed than incorrect though. I would like to see Chrome OS get rebranded.
What aspects of Chrome OS make you say that it has more functionality (windows I guess) and freedom than Android ?
More functionality:
ChromeOS is a normal Linux distribution (based on Gentoo), complete with package manager and all that. Enabling developer mode gives you access to everything.
Mostly however, people install a Crouton chroot in order to not interfere with the normal update process, and because they are more familiar with it, as Gentoo can be intimidating for some.
More freedom:
There is not much non-free software on a Chromebook. Chrome, Flash plugin, WiFi firmware, Firmware Support Package (on Intel), Mali OpenGL drivers (on ARM).
In contrast, a typical Android device comes loaded full of proprietary software.
So soon we’ll have apps that run permanently in the background, nag you to play games, and display ads all over the place on our desktop systems….
Yeah, pretty sure I wouldn’t want to run android applications on any laptop/desktop system.
This couldn’t turn out as bad as Metro could it?
In principle it sounds good to be able to run appliations like Evernote, but in practice the interfaces for mobile-first applications have been simplified so much to accommodate small native screen sizes and touch that they’re not awesome on the big screen.
IMHO this is why Metro never went anywhere.
I think the fact that these apps are distributed via the play store and that in theory they are responsive such that they run on both Android and Chrome is clouding the really awesome story here: Native apps are coming to Chrome. Period. That is awesome because frankly I find the browser only model in Chrome to be quite limiting.
OTOH, this really isn’t as awesome as it might sound because ChromeOS is still lacking tons of advanced functionality that Android has. I have a chromebit but it really is a toy compared to Android which is funny since historically the desktop OS is the big brother. For example: Notification area, sharing between apps via intents, advanced app permissions, etc.
The joy of having crap mobile apps instead of using a proper web app / site.
A proper web app? What might this be? I hear so much about them, but have yet to see one since every web app I ever run across is garbage.
They sure sound doom’ed.
I’d rather have web crap than local binary crap…
Queue the absence of evidence fallacy: Because you’ve never seen it, it must not exist. Come on, you’re smarter than that. Besides the fact that “proper” is ambiguous (define “proper” in this context, and I’ll bet it doesn’t match everyone’s or even most people’s definition), a web app shouldn’t be held to a different standard than a compiled app. A “bad” compiled app is bad, and a bad web app is bad, but web apps aren’t inherently bad just because they’re web apps.
I’ve come across some wretched web apps in the past (and in fact I am forced to use a few at work, since everything is going “into the cloud” and our government IT department is struggling to keep up), but I’ve also used some really great ones, like Vultr’s control panel, the Cloud 9 IDE, MailChimp, and so on.
Ah, the not actually reading straw man. I said I’d not seen one, not that they didn’t exist.
Speaking as someone that was previously highly skeptical of the feasibility of ChromeOS as a daily driver, I must say that I was pleasantly surprised when I turned an old Asus EEEPC netbook (1001PE) that my mother gave to my daughters a few years ago and that was collecting dust into a bespoke Chromebook using CloudReady.
That netbook came with Windows 7 Starter which baffles me: whomever green lit the sale of those things with an OS as heavy as Windows 7 (even the Starter edition, limited as it is) deserves to BURN IN HELL! The thing was too slow to do anything even when it was brand new!
Then a couple of weeks ago I decided to pick CloudReady and give it a whirl. For some reason, it refused to install side-by-side with Windows even though it claims to be capable of doing it so I decided to go ahead and nuke Windows and do a full install.
I figured that my kids wouldn’t use much more than Google to do their homework, social networks and maybe play a few Flash games so the enhanced performance of such a minimalist OS coupled with a capable browser such as Chrome (in this case, Chromium) would be a plus.
But as soon as I started toying with it, I started to realize the full potential of the concept. I mean, you have decent office productivity through Google Docs and Office 365 plus the assorted Google services (GMail, Maps, Calendar, etc.) that are already staples of my toolkit.
CloudReady also comes with the developer mode enabled by default so I can have a decent and relatively functional shell by simply opening crosh and then typing shell. I also installed Chrome Brew to see what else I could use before considering things like Crouton.
Then you go to the Chrome Web Store and find things like SSH, RDP & VNC clients galore, decent image editors such as Pixlr, I can use Hangouts to videochat, Spotify to listen to music, Youtube and Vimeo (even though the EEEPC is a little weak to be able to reproduce anything with 720p and above reliably) and drive my Chromecast with it.
I was also surprised to see that there were plug-ins for SMB/CIFS for its file manager that allow the little beast to access my file server and watch torrented shows and movies with the help of video players with subtitles support available in the web store.
And it is not like we aren’t already using lots of web apps anyway. Things like DD-WRT, Transmission, CouchPotato & SickBeard, cloud IDEs, etc. show that there are plenty of great web apps out there.
The only drawback that stood out to me from the experience was printing. It only supports printing through Google Cloud Print which wasn’t a big deal for me because I was already using CUPS and the CUPS Google Cloud Print connector in my print server for the Android phones in this household anyway. However, unless the user already has a printer that supports it natively, I can’t see many users willing to set up something similar themselves.
Everything else is as straightforward and stress-free as it can possibly be. Honestly, it is a lot less limited than I assumed it would be and the form factor is ideal IMHO.
These are interesting observations.
I have been investigating re-purposing the netbook given to my mother-in-law, and returned to us because of severe usability issues. She was using the netbook infrequently. Whenever she turned it on, the darn Windows 7 system was essentially unusable while it was “checking for updates”!
From what I can gather, CloudReady sits somewhere between Chrome OS (provided with Chromebooks) and the related Chromium OS open-source project.
A Chromebook has additional hardware features to support the security concepts of Chrome OS: a non-modifiable boot ROM, a real jumper requiring dissembly of the unit for enabling/disabling flashing the firmware, and hardware based encryption. In some Chromebook, the chips for the flash drive are soldered making it nearly impossible to remove the flash drive to un-encrypt its contents on another machine.
Also, as far as I understand it, dual-booting of CloudReady is possible only on UEFI based systems. This is again related to security.
The downside of Chrome OS/Chromium OS is the difficulty in providing local printing and scanning. There are ways to work-around this – some easier to implement than others.
Yeah, I currently don’t know what is its approach regarding scanning although I must say that even though I have a HP multifunction printer at home, I seldom use the scanning function. But it is nice to have it when needed.
Edited 2016-04-29 20:25 UTC
The meat of your argument was “Good web apps? What good web apps? I’ve certainly never seen one!”
That is an implication that because you have not observed X, X must not be true. But since you insist that is not what you meant, please elaborate. What should we infer from your statement that there are no good web apps (“A proper web app? What might this be?”), because you have yet to see a good web app (“I hear so much about them, but have yet to see one since every web app I ever run across is garbage.”)?
Sorry, not a strawman, just genuinely curious what else you could possibly mean by that.
I have never seen what I’d call a good web app, and I’m judging them based on native apps because that is the benchmark by which they will always be judged as long as native apps exist. They are slower, less featured, and often have more bugs because of the immediate changes once the web page is updated. The fact that you chose to read something in it that I did not say is something I cannot help.
So you haven’t seen Google Docs, because is a pretty decent office suite that is free, loads up quicker than Office does (and libre office on my linux machine) and can save files in all the popular formats.
I could list quite a few decent little tools that essentially web apps that I use everyday.
So I don’t think you were looking very hard.
Edited 2016-04-27 08:36 UTC
I have seen Google Docs, yes, and I’d certainly not call it faster thanOffice. It loads faster, but it’s slower when actually working with it. And everything loads faster than that bloated crap they call LibreOffice. It’s got a good interface, and it works, but… well, it’s noticeably slower than a native equivalent.
It is not noticeably slower unless you machine is ancient.
Wait, LibreOffice is not a compiled, native app? Since when? Or were you referring to the still-in-pre-alpha “cloud” version that will likely be abandoned due to lack of developer interest?
I agree though, it can be really slow, even on a fast machine. I usually just use Abiword and Gnumeric the three times a year I need something like that.
In your opinion, obviously mine differs.
The spotify web player is pretty decent.
Web apps may not have the same functionality of binary ones but they are easier to maintain across multiple devices.
I’ve been deploying them for 8 years now and there is an entire business of people that request us to port binary applications to the web (anything from simple accounting software, internal messaging tools to full blown development environment based on jira, openstack and so on).
Mobile apps are however not that useful (if you have alternatives). They are however practical and easy to understand.
Just take a child and see how fast he will learn to draw shapes on a mobile device than on a computer.
<message name=”IDS_ARC_OPT_IN_DIALOG_DESCRIPTION” desc=”Description of the opt-in dialog for Android apps.”>
^^That mentions ARC, the Android Runtime for Chrome (not ChromeOS!)
So after digging just a little deeper I found this description of ARC that seems to confirm it is a Chrome technique, not a Chrome OS technique. This means Android apps are coming to basically every platform except iOS!
In September, Google launched ARC—the “App Runtime for Chrome,”—a project that allowed Android apps to run on Chrome OS. A few days later, a hack revealed the project’s full potential: it enabled ARC on every “desktop” version of Chrome, meaning you could unofficially run Android apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. ARC made Android apps run on nearly every computing platform (save iOS).
ARC is an early beta though so Google has kept the project’s reach very limited—only a handful of apps have been ported to ARC, which have all been the result of close collaborations between Google and the app developer. Now though, Google is taking two big steps forward with the latest developer preview: it’s allowing any developer to run their app on ARC via a new Chrome app packager, and it’s allowing ARC to run on any desktop OS with a Chrome browser.
ARC runs Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS thanks to Native Client (abbreviated “NaCL”). NaCL is a Chrome sandboxing technology that allows Chrome apps and plugins to run at “near native” speeds, taking full advantage of the system’s CPU and GPU.
Sources:
1) http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/it-looks-like-the-google-pla…
2) http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/googles-arc-opens-up-to-deve…
I found a lot more evidence and details that describe the possibilities of Android on Chrome: http://www.windowscentral.com/google-could-allow-all-androids-apps-…
Yes, provided the system’s CPU is 32-bit and little endian, because those are the parameters built into the LLVM target. Other CPUs can emulate these properties of course, but it won’t be taking full advantage of the CPU anymore.
For those of us with a touchscreen Chromebook (I have the Asus flip-screen model), this is good news. However, having played with an early port of the Evernote for Android App on the Chromebook, I’m a little worried about poor display resolution.