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Android Chrome Google

Chrome OS Can Now Run Android Apps With No Porting Required 133

Posted by timothy from the that-could-be-big dept.
An anonymous reader writes On Thursday, Google launched "App Runtime for Chrome (Beta)" which allows Android apps to run on Chrome OS without the need for porting. At the moment, only Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine are available on the platform with the rest of the Play Store's offerings to come later. Google "built an entire Android stack into Chrome OS using Native Client" in order to achieve this.
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Chrome OS Can Now Run Android Apps With No Porting Required More

Chrome OS Can Now Run Android Apps With No Porting Required

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  • Because the stock AVD emulator stinks and HAXM acceleration is difficult to get working on it. Genymotion is my current solution when I need a fast emulator.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Sure, if you're the dev for Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, or Vine.

    • The Moto G series of Android phones is cheap, easy to put into developer mode to load your apps via usb, runs kitkat, and takes less time to load your compiled app onto than it takes to even start up the emulator on a quad core pc. And there's plenty of $100 android tablets around if you want to test larger displays. The AVD emulator absolutely sucks, and would have been better with a simulator.

  • Android (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So now it's just Android with a windowing system?

  • Why not all apps at once? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @09:49PM (#47886309)

    Google launched "App Runtime for Chrome (Beta)" which allows Android apps to run on Chrome OS without the need for porting. At the moment, only Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine are available on the platform with the rest of the Play Store's offerings to come later.

    I wonder why all apps aren't available at once. I understand this App Runtime for Chrome akin to the Java RunTime, which when installed, would have all Java applications available. What am I [mis]understanding?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The massive testing required to ensure all the apps will work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nleven ( 1848188 )
      I would assume this emulation layer is still not perfect. Say, many android apps have arm binaries. There are other subtle gaps in user differences as well. You really don't want to make it look like an android emulator for chrome os.

      • Re:Why not all apps at once? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @10:13PM (#47886411) Journal
        Even if it were perfect, almost no ChromeOS devices have touchscreens and almost all Android devices do (especially if you count on the ones Google even slightly endorses, not the media-player-mystery-HDMI-dongle stuff). For applications that are basically hobbled by the touchscreen, a keyboard and mouse will be an improvement. For those that are enhanced by, or actively dependent on, it, that will be a bit of a mess no matter how perfect the runtime is.

        Unless those proportions change fairly markedly, it probably makes sense for them to start with some popular, mouse and keyboard friendly, applications that don't lean on native ARM blobs much or at all.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by iamacat ( 583406 )

          Luckily all chromebooks come with multitouch touchpads which are perfectly capable of handling pinch/rotate gestures.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Say, many android apps have arm binaries.

        Well, many Chrome OS devices [samsung.com] are ARM-- and supporting multiple architectures is something all Android apps have to deal with on actual Android.

        With only a few apps released, I'm guessing not everything is ready and they want to do it slow and steady. I wish they'd release this stuff and let everyone develop in the open on the canary builds of ChromeOS and let devs know what this environment is like, what SDK might be needed, how to configure the manifest, how to pre

      • Re:Why not all apps at once? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @10:25PM (#47886467)

        Some points here:

        - Most Android apps are Java bytecode, not native code, so the underlying processor architecture is irrelevant (for those apps)
        - x86 is a supported Android platform, so many apps that do require native code have x86 binaries available
        - Intel provides an ARM emulator for the x86 version of Android so that x86 Android devices can run ARM binaries
        - Some ChromeOS devices use ARM processors to begin with.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          - Android apps are compiled into Google's Dalvik bytecode, not java.
          - x86 and arm does not play well together, despite 'emulation'

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Guspaz ( 556486 )

            - The difference is irrelevant, the apps are stored as platform-independent bytecode that (as of the next Android release) is then converted to machine code by ART or done on-the-fly by Dalvik itself. As a result, so long as Dalvik or ART supports the processor architecture, the application doesn't need to.

            - As long as the ARM app doesn't use NEON (which I believe Intel's Houdini emulator doesn't support), it shouldn't have any problems running the ARM code on the x86 devices. In fact, you're likely to have

      • Say, many android apps have arm binaries

        Android apps are interpreted byte-code, not native binaries, same as java class files are interpreted byte code. The only binary you need is the dalvek apk interpreter, same as the only binary you need to run java on a windows machine is a windows java interpreter, and the only binary you need to run the same java class files on a linux box is a linux java interpreter.

        So, if they've come up with a dalvek interpreter that runs on chromebooks, this is a good thing. It shouldn't look like the crappy androi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by batkiwi ( 137781 )

          Incorrect. Many android apps have arm binaries.

          https://developer.android.com/... [android.com]

          Many do not, to be fair, but most games do at the very least.

          • The only people I know who own chromebooks are university students. They already have smartphones to play their games on. And regular pcs. And game consoles. Also, a quick look shows that stores are now offering dual-core intel cpus on their chromebooks, so apps running using native arm methods are going to have to be ported anyway. The upside of this is two-fold.
            1. Given the larger screen size and different input methods, this is an opportunity to re-imagine any game or other app.
            2. Given the faster cpus c

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by batkiwi ( 137781 )

              That doesn't make what you said any less incorrect.

              • Actually, the incorrect part was you writing "Incorrect. Many android apps have arm binaries." There's a difference between using native methods, and being an arm binary. Something that's an arm binary doesn't need dalvik to run (example - the linux os that dalvik runs atop of). Apps, even those using native methods, cannot run stand-alone on the arm cpu..

                The very first part of the very first sentence you linked to:

                The NDK is a toolset that allows you to implement parts of your app using native-code languages

                There is simply, by definition, no such thing as an "arm binary android app." All apps

        • Android apps are interpreted byte-code, not native binaries

          Unless they use the NDK.

          The only binary you need is the dalvek apk interpreter

          What about if they use the NDK? What happens if the application uses OpenGL ES?

    • Perhaps they want to make sure it works for a few selected apps, so the developers of all the other apps in the play store don't get flooded with complaints if there are issues?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mhkohne ( 3854 )

      The first big issue will be screen sizes - Android has provisions for apps supporting multiple screen sizes, but it's kind of weird in how it works, and not every app works well (or at all) if you hand it a screen size markedly different than what it was designed for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

        The Evernote app, at least, appears to "solve" this by putting a fixed-size window on the screen. Not resizable, or dockable.

    • Google's NaCL only works with x86[64] the majority of apps use native libraries that are ARM. Only pure Android SDK apps (Java and java dependencies) will work. So say if you use libZbar (bar code decoding library) which is supplied in x86 and ARM, will work, is that app packaged the x86 version... which they didn't do becuase no one runs android on x86....

      So that's the main technical reason.

    • I wonder why all apps aren't available at once. I understand this App Runtime for Chrome akin to the Java RunTime, which when installed, would have all Java applications available. What am I [mis]understanding?

      Probably partly because it's not stable yet, but allso many/most apps won't work well since they tend to assume that the device has touchscreen support. That's reasonable for Android devices, but usually wrong for ChromeOS. Properly supporting keyboard navigation is a bit of a task when you've designed for touch... as Windows 8 metro demonstrates... Metro's OK if you have a touchscreen but a nightmare with a mouse.

  • Android apps on all Linux distros? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does this mean that we'll be able to run Android apps on Linux soon? ChromeOS is basically just Gentoo as far as I am aware.

  • Here's where this gets funny (Score:3)

    by atari2600a ( 1892574 ) on Thursday September 11, 2014 @11:06PM (#47886621)
    There are 2 Acer C710's in the house right now. My own spec-upped one w/ a custom seabios booting directly to ubuntu, & my little brother's friend has a stock one. I bolt in all OMG go to the app store go to the app store! You can download Google Play! He's all what's Google Play? "The app store!"

  • Never failed before (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sun ( 104778 ) on Friday September 12, 2014 @01:20AM (#47887109) Homepage

    I mean, OS/2 running Windows apps was a huge push forward for IBM. Wine completely changed the Linux desktop picture, and BSD's Linux binary compatibility made it an effective super set of Linux, to the point nobody bothers to install the later (not to mention the similar capability of SCO Unix: they wouldn't be where they are today without it).

    I hear that ChromOS is a nice platform and is doing well. I'm glad, in a "diversity is good" non-committed sort of way. I don't think this particular feature will change much.

    Shachar

  • Hopefully we will eventually see an android port of XBMC or similar for ChromeOS. Not being able to conveniently stream local content is the biggest limitation to CrOS imo.

  • What's the diff? (Score:3)

    by countach ( 534280 ) on Friday September 12, 2014 @08:08AM (#47888337)

    So to ask a stupid question... since Android contains Chrome, and now Chrome contains Android, why are they different, and/or why do they need to be different?

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