Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks (opens in new tab)

Everyone wants to be the only walled garden... https://xkcd.com/927/

That doesn't stop them from announcing all sorts of things that have rough edges. Some of them keep their rough edges for years.

Touchscreen support. For example, I use Zinio to read magazines. The webapp can't zoom, doesn't handle portrait mode well, and is pretty bad with touch. Actually it's pretty broken in general. But the Android app runs great on my Chromebook and has a good fullscreen touch UI.

Similar with something like Google Play Books. The Android app has a good fullscreen touch UI and has a notes feature that the webapp doesn't.

Having 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.

It's a pretty huge deal, at least in my eyes. Chromebooks have this enormous following because of the price. Now, every app in the Play Store is installable to this huge group of laptop users. That means when a company wants their app to be on Android, they consent to it being on laptops as well. This means Microsoft Office and Apple Music are on ChromeOS laptops. It's a very effective strategy to vastly increase the viability of Chromebooks for regular users using other companies' apps. I never expected to see Apple developing apps for a Google-controlled laptop OS, but here we are.

Perhaps not game changing, but it is interesting to look at the overall 'universal' app trend between Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Microsoft's UWP platform - for Microsoft it's about bringing users from their strong desktop market to Windows Phone.

Google - Android apps on Chrome OS. Google seem to be doing the opposite of Microsoft and making a play for the desktop market.

Apple and the iOS-ification of OS X - Similar to Google, Apple seem to be preparing to pull in their phone market stronghold onto the desktop.

Seems like Microsoft and Google are directly competing here, and Apple is competing with themselves.

Literally? Hearthstone. You can now play Hearthstone on a Chromebook.

probably nothing, you'll have two different Gmail apps

Best bet, they're kept separately. Different runtimes (one JRE, one browser environment).

urm, there is a gmail app on chromeos?

it just links to gmail.com if i use the gmail shortcut on my tray and i couldnt find another app on the store.

I thought this was a big rumor for a few days that ended up getting extinguished by a Google exec.

Did you even read the article?

"I can see a future where a mandatory Google account follows you up the grades. Educational software is released exclusively in Google's Play store. Assignments and homework are handed in with Google Drive and Google Docs."

This is not the future. This is now. At the school district where I volunteer as a computer instructor, all the first graders already have a Google account that will follow them throughout their grades. In fact their user names include the year they are expected to graduate. They are teaching first graders how to use Google docs. Editing a Google doc is their first big lesson. I see them as walled in, but from their perspective the Google ecosystem is all there is to the internet.

They took a page from Microsoft's playbook. They know that you have to capture the next generation in schools.

I agree with your worries. But it also tells that other parties in the market have utterly failed to compete. iPads used to get traction, but are more expensive, and Apple doesn't provide a complete ecosystem like Google Apps for Education. Microsoft has been sleeping, they have all the pieces but wanted to push Windows as-is. The open source solutions require you to hire some sysadmins, while Google Apps did exactly the opposite: it cut out some personnel that used to maintain the infrastructure.

> Google is more interested in getting people into the garden than it is in selling hardware or fostering education

All for-profit companies are interested in turning a profit. No company would be interested in fostering education, no matter what they say. The question is whether their profit motives are harmful to the education.

The larger point here is about the dangers of the cloud. Google could chose not to allow you access to your own data. It can hand it over to the government. A hacker can break into your data and impersonate you remotely, even if you went off the grid. If they become a monopoly, they can jack up their prices and you would have no recourse. They could offer you crappy service and you will have to swallow it.

I'm limited to only my experience in the U.S. public school system (and two universities, one private, one public) but education itself seems to be a walled garden. Curricula are set by policy, not by the instructor. Textbooks are pre-determined, and largely non-negotiable. Many classes mandate all sorts of closed software, sometimes begrudgingly allowing Octave in place of Matlab, for example. Many CS courses mandate a particular language, proprietary or not. And it's nothing new; when I was growing up, it was Apple ][ machines in every classroom. Even in my master's program, the layout templates for the thesis were provided assuming I was using Word. I had to parse them and mirror them into LaTeX so I could use the tools of my choice.

I understand and agree with your concerns, but choice has never been a staple of the education system I've encountered. Perhaps it is different elsewhere.

I understand this concern. I've helped deploy chromebooks and linux based laptops and pcs at my daughters school. I am pro open source and would love to see lots of digging into understanding the systems. However I am also in favor of chromebooks. Here's why:

The alternative to chromebooks isn't a glorious world of non-locked down non-cloud dependent machines. It's a world of poorly managed, crappy windows boxes. A world where students pass around USB keys. A world that is at least as locked down as a chromebook but much less secure and in many ways less flexible.

Chromebooks, as locked down and hermetically sealed as they are as an ecosystem, are great for one simple reason: they free up time and resources. I'd rather see a fleet of chromebooks that are dead simple to manage and deploy and then take all that extra time and money and spend it on equipment a linux or osx or whatever based lab full of machines students can hack on and learn to code on and hook up to actuators or whatever they want to do.

90% of computer management in a school is dealing with day to day "can't print / how to load a document / etc". I've seen this completely evaporate at my daughter's school after rolling out chromebooks. It's amazing.

So bring on chromebooks as locked down, easy to manage dedicated "get homework done" devices and free up time and money (because man are they cheap) to teach programming and hardware and everything else in a real computer lab.

Apple was basically in the same position and they lost it to google.

Someday there will be something better and people will switch.

To be fair most of these schools probably already have iPads anyway. My mom's school gave out iPads and MacBooks to teachers and classrooms like crazy.

Tablets 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.

Right, its much better if computerised education is limited to browser based applications.

This does, however mean that

1. This depends on closed-source code (libhoudini is Intel code, and it's not open, last I heard). I guess it's not the first piece of closed-source code in Chromebooks, but it's a crucial piece.

2. This code is still not portable, it just runs on 2 archs, unless someone writes a libhoudini for all other archs as well.

I 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.

There are also many Arm Chromebooks.

Source? On Android and under ARC you're SOL if an NDK app doesn't provide binaries for your architecture. This is rarely an issue though, as most apps just opt to ship with binaries compiled for every supported ABI.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis.html

"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"

How would this happen?

I doesn't appear on this list: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6401474

According to Ars Technica, the list of compatible Chromebooks appears to be age based. Older Chromebook devices, including the Chromebook Pixel, just aren't officially supported. [1]

[1] [ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/if-you-want-to-run-an... ]

I 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

The original Pixel has a touchscreen.

I'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.

Errr, yes they are. From the article: In Q1 of this year, Chromebooks topped Macs in overall shipments to become the #2 most popular PC operating system in the US.

Only the mediocre ones it seems.

Hopefully it will push the Android ecosystem to accommodate larger screen sizes.

Not to mention that my fingers are huge.

I wouldn't mind running chromium as root. Well, maybe a separate, small binary whose sole purpose is to manage the containers.

Hmm... 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.

The usual -- Windows, Mac, Linux. I use all 3.

Could 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.

Yo dawg, I heard you like web technologies so I put an Electron app in your Chrome OS so you can kill your battery with 20 concurrent unkillable Chrome threads [1]

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/xzibit-yo-dawg (extremely tenuous meme ref going here)

Personally 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&catalogI...

I'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?

Correct.

My question was about that specific list and I should have been more specific.

Pixel 2015?

So there is a new one coming?

Crouton 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.)

I must say Intellij was what I was thinking of primarily.

Have you got a link?

Previously when I looked at this, Crouton required me to root the Chromebook and effectively switch to Linux rather than run it under Chrome O/S.

If that's changed (which from your post it sounds like it has), then I need to have another look at this!

What about the missing Windows key?

Are 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.

I think his point is they'll just become Android laptops.

It'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.

Careful, Oracle might use this statement!

Interesting, can that be virtualised I wonder?

Yes I was thinking about getting IntelliJ on a Chromebook as android app.

Sounds like Windows 8 where the desktop was an "app" on the Start screen.