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Google Play Store and Over a Million Android Apps Coming To Chromebooks (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the desktop-and-mobile-uniformity dept.

It's official: the Google Play Store is coming to Chrome OS. The company announced on Thursday that it is bringing more than 1.5 million Android apps to Chromebooks. Google adds that zero efforts are required from developers' end for their Android apps to function on Chrome OS. Users will also be able to see notifications and have in-line replies on the desktop. Users on developer channel builds of Chrome OS will get an option to use Google Play and Android apps starting early next month. Regular users on select Chromebook models will have this feature in September. Ars Technica has tons of more details about it. The Verge says Android apps are just what Chromebooks needed.

4 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. I hope this signals a change for local storage by geschbacher79 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Right now, Chromebooks don't have large amounts of local storage ("It belongs in the cloud!"). Hopefully with Android support (with some games running into the gigs) this will push Chromebooks to offer large amounts of storage (64, 128, etc) and basically make these real laptops, instead of cloudy-laptops. This is great news though, especially for Chromebooks with touchscreens.

    1. Re:I hope this signals a change for local storage by LichtSpektren · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Real laptops already exist if you want that. Chromebooks currently serve a nice niche of cheap laptops with great performance if you don't need local apps. I don't see why it would be intelligent to move away from that.

  2. vs. OS X Dashboard by Jodka · · Score: 2

    I am back to developing on Linux after a long stint on OS X and one thing I really miss now is the OS X Dashboard widgets.

    Ubuntu is way behind OS X here, even if they integrated a Dashboard clone the ecosystem of widgets would be far behind and never catch up. But Ubuntu could leapfrog the OS X Dashboard by absorbing Chrome's support for Android widgets into an integrated Dashboard clone.

    --
    Ceci n'est pas une signature.
  3. My wife loves her Chromebook. You don't have to by raymorris · · Score: 2

    My wife loves her Chromebook. Although it is set up to dual boot to Ubuntu, and she's comfortable with Linux, she has never needed it. ChromeOS does everything she wants to do. I was surprised how good the battery life is, too.

    You don't HAVE to run Android apps on it just because you CAN.