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Chrome OS Can Now Run Android Apps With No Porting Required

Posted by timothy on from the that-could-be-big dept.

An anonymous reader writes On Thursday, Google launched "App Runtime for Chrome (Beta)" which allows Android apps to run on Chrome OS without the need for porting. At the moment, only Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine are available on the platform with the rest of the Play Store's offerings to come later. Google "built an entire Android stack into Chrome OS using Native Client" in order to achieve this.

2 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Android by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Chromebook seems to be doing pretty well.

    According to US market-watcher NPD, during the 11 months from January through November 2013, the platform’s share of the computing device market had risen to 9.6 per cent from just 0.2 per cent in the same months of the previous year.

    Giving it the ability to run Android apps just makes it more capable. Assuming the "emulation" works well on the underpowered hardware running most Chromebooks.

  2. Re:Why not all apps at once? by Guspaz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some points here:

    - Most Android apps are Java bytecode, not native code, so the underlying processor architecture is irrelevant (for those apps)
    - x86 is a supported Android platform, so many apps that do require native code have x86 binaries available
    - Intel provides an ARM emulator for the x86 version of Android so that x86 Android devices can run ARM binaries
    - Some ChromeOS devices use ARM processors to begin with.