Chrome OS wasn’t mentioned once at yesterday’s Google I/O keynote, but there was a big update coming: Android apps will be part of that experience in a move that proves that the ‘merger’ between the two platforms was indeed a reality.
Google waited until day two of its I/O developer conference to announce what might be its biggest and most impactful news. With the Play Store, Chrome OS is suddenly a lot more compelling to users who might have shied away from using a device that could only use the web and web apps.
That’s the real story here: Chrome OS users will be capable of running lots of Android apps on their Chromebooks thanks to the arrival of the Google Play Store to this operating system. In fact the integration of the two OS’s seems pretty natural:
Apps show up as fully independent, separate, resizeable windows, instead of inside some weird Android zone. Their notifications appear inside Chrome OS’s own notifications area
What is more interesting here is that there’s no emulation or virtualization here: Android runs almost natively thanks to containers and has “full access” to resources such as Wi-Fi, processor or RAM -and of course, to the touch screen-. This move won’t make Android a desktop operating system at last by itself -and the approach is different from Remix OS-, but its combination with Chrome OS seems to make sense. This feature will be available for every certain Chrome OS user in the fall; it will be interesting to see what’s improved in that moment.
Source: Bring Your Android App to Chromebooks | Android Developers Blog
