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

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."

Comments

Re:Finally a universal binary standard

[Chas]

This is it; write once run anywhere has finally arrived.

Nononono. As always. "Write Once, Beta Everywhere".

Re:Please make this thing useful for development

[segin]

It's worth noting that the Android API already provides methods and identifiers specifically for handling mice and styluses. see http://developer.android.com/r... and http://developer.android.com/r...