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Android Apps Now Unofficially Able To Run On Any Major Desktop OS

Posted by timothy on from the crash-early-and-often dept.

An anonymous reader writes A developer who goes by the handle Vladikoff has tweaked Google's App Runtime for Chrome (ARC) to allow any Android app to run on any major desktop operating system, not just the handful announced last week which were also limited to Chrome OS. His tweaked version of ARC is re-packaged as ARChon. The install isn't very straightforward, and you have to be in developer mode on Chrome. But there's a support forum on reddit. The extension will work on any OS running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up as long as the user also installs chromeos-apk, which converts raw Android app packages (APKs) to a Chrome extension. Ars Technica reports that apps run this way are buggy, fast, and crash often but expresses optimism for when Google officially "opens the floodgates on the Play Store, putting 1.3 million Android apps onto nearly every platform."

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Please make this thing useful for development by loufoque · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just run Android for x86 if you don't want the overhead of emulating ARM...

  2. Re:Finally a universal binary standard by guises · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But why would you want to? The interface is completely different.

  3. Re: Please make this thing useful for development by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    android-x86 is a bit of a dog's breakfast. They only kick out a release image every now and again, everything never works, lots of crashes. The latest 4.4 image is way less stable than the last 4.0 image they put out, and they stopped building nightlies and so did everyone else. It's really quite useless and always has been, because they never actually finish a release. Google kicks out a new version, they say "Ooh, shiny!" and they move on before they actually get the system working reliably or properly. Then you get to deal with all the apps that won't work right on x86 on top of that. It makes far more sense at this point to go ahead and run the emulator.

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  4. Re:If this works, then Microsoft is doomed. by swillden · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If this technology matures to the point that it's stable on every desktop OS, then the OS is reduced is reduced to simply being a platform

    Java did that years ago. Notice how it destroyed Microsoft?

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