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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 ChunderDownunder · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The cynic in me suggests this is a pre-emptive strike against alternative open-source OSes Tizen and Firefox OS.

    By utilizing a Chrome-only technology (NaCl), by value-adding, Google kills off Gecko and Webkit competitors running a pure HTML5 platform.

    (Also stifling adoption of BB and Sailfish, which both include Android compatibility)

  2. Re: Wow by Wootery · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I can absolutely see this replacing Windows for office workers (presuming they don't mind the few-and-far-between formatting bugs with GDocs importing DOCX)

    Err, what? There are several elephants in the room who'd like to be acknowledged.

    • - Not all organisations trust Google with their documents, which may contain proprietary information
    • - Using Google Docs introduces a dependency on Google (they're uptime track-record is pretty damn good though, granted)
    • - Using Google Docs introduces a dependency on an Internet connection

    These are the real problems with cloud-based office software. They would apply even if Google Docs were totally free of bugs, and capable of everything that MS Office is capable of.

    Of course all those points apply equally to Microsoft's surprisingly good web-based Office offerings, and to any other rival 'cloud-based office software' services.