Chrome OS Will Finally Run Android Apps in the Background (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: While it's no longer a novelty to run Android apps on your Chromebook, that doesn't mean they run well. To date, most of those apps pause when you switch away -- fine for a phone, but not what you'd expect on a computer with a multi-window interface. However, they're about to become far more functional. Chrome Unboxed has learned that the Chrome OS 64 beta introduces Android Parallel Tasks, which lets Android apps run at full bore regardless of what you're doing. You could watch a video in a mobile app while you're surfing the web, or take a break from a mobile game without jarring transitions. There's no guarantee that Android Parallel Tasks will reach the stable Chrome OS 64, so you might not want to plan a purchase around the feature.

Comments

"Write once, run anywhere."

[emil]

For such an amazingly portable runtime platform, it's curious how rarely I see operational .APKs on non-Android platforms.

This was not quite the panacea that we were led to believe so long ago.

OS development hit a brick wall 20 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

We often talk about the so-called "AI winter", where artificial intelligence stagnated for decades. Even today we're not out of it, with the most advanced "artificial intelligence" around just tending to be complex statistical models that give desirable outputs, rather than anything resembling actual cognition.

I think we've been in an "OS winter" since about 1995 or 1996. That was the last time we saw anything truly innovative when it comes to OSes, with the release of Windows 95. That was the last time we had an OS release that improved the user experience in any significant way.

Windows 10 is clearly just a devolution of the Windows 95 model, where Windows 95's simple and effective start menu and taskbar have been muddled up.

macOS is just some minor improvements to NeXTSTEP, which dates back to the 1980s.

Linux of today, with crap like systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3, and Wayland forced on its users, is actually a big step backward from what it was in 1995.

iOS and Android are effectively just prettier Palm OS-style systems, where you poke them with your finger instead of a stylus.

Embedded and realtime OSes haven't improved much since the 1990s.

If you had told people from 1997 about Chrome OS, and said it'd be in use in 2018, they would have thought that you were full of shit! They couldn't comprehend why anyone would waste their time with an OS that's so limited, especially compared to what was common in 1997.

OS development has totally stagnated. There hasn't been much forward progress since the mid 1990s, and there has actually been a lot of backward regression.

Re:Give the option to run full fat Linux apps

[squiggleslash]

You can do that already by putting it in developer mode. The concept behind Chromebooks is that they're heavily sandboxed by default, so the environment is safe and you don't have to worry about viruses or other security issues (beyond those inherent in sharing your data with Google.) Android apps are relatively easy to fit into that idea, raw ix86 binaries not so much.

Non-android apks

[DrYak]

it's curious how rarely I see operational .APKs on non-Android platforms.

Jolla's Sailfish OS,
Samsung's Tizen,
and Blackberry
(and of course TFA's ChromeOS) :
all have Android compatibility layers.

Microsoft Windows made an attempt but didn't succeed. (WSL is what they managed to salvage out of the remnant of their failed attempt).