Google’s ARC Now Runs Android Apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac, and Linux

I&#x27;ve had the opportunity to work with this project and it does deliver. In terms of code portability it&#x27;s pretty good. Small changes had to be done to accommodate some yet to be supported APIs. No big deal though. The performance is good. Even on the low end chromebook I test with. Myonly concern is related to how the (my) codebase might need to evolve over time to adapt to ARC updates. Right now it&#x27;s pretty sane with only a handful of extra settings on the manifest file. But I worry about being forced into forking. Having two similar but slightly different codebase for the same app is silly.<p>The overall experience with the Google team has been very positive. Which, in all honesty, surprised me. I was expecting the typical corporate attitude towards outsiders. The way the ARC team has gone above and beyond to help has been refreshing.<p>I do worry as to how this would affect the openness of the web. A closed source container used to run other closed sourced clients is not my idea of how the Web should be. Even Mozilla is going down this route with their browser apps. Though I have more trust in Mozilla than in Google in regards to having and keeping an open web. Either way, it raises an important question: Where is the Web going in the next 10 years? I wish I knew. Right now it looks like a toss up.

This is absolutely huge and I think some people may be missing its significance.<p>Back in the 90&#x27;s Windows had a huge monopoly due to network effects - developers would target Windows because it had the greatest number of potential users. But now they will target Android for the same reason because it can run on Windows, Mac, ChromeOS and Android smartphones.<p>This &quot;Android First&quot; model will affect several major areas, all in Google&#x27;s favour:<p>1. It strengthens ChromeOS over Windows.<p>ChromeOS is already a strong player in the education and low-price sectors. Having a huge range of Android apps will make ChromeOS far more attractive and grow its market share. Moreover if corporate, boring-office-CRUD developers switch to an Android-first model then it will very quickly kill Windows.<p>2. It strengthens Chrome over Firefox and IE.<p>Many apps will now <i>require</i> the Chrome browser to run. Oh, you are running Firefox on Windows and want to play that cool Android game your friend told you about? Just switch to Chrome and sign in with your Google account! Again there are network effects - the greater Chrome&#x27;s market share the more willing developers are to create Chrome-only apps.<p>3. It strengthens Android over iOS.<p>Android has about 85% of smartphone market share, but many startups are still undecided about an Android-first approach because a single Apple user generates far more revenue than a single Android user. Having Android run on desktops will push some startups off the fence in favour of Android-first. A few developers switching from iOS to Android doesn&#x27;t sound like much, but if there are a ever a critical mass of Android-only apps it will quickly kill iOS. Apple should be worried.<p>4. It strengthens Native over Web-app development.<p>Ok this isn&#x27;t a huge benefit for Google, but it is significant for developers. Back in 2005 every startup chose browser-based web apps as their target platform. The rise of smartphones has pushed the pendulum back towards native development, but desktops have remained the preserve of web apps. Many startups now develop both a Web App and Android version of their product - by dumping Web App development startups will now be able to (a) save costs; (b) produce a desktop app that has native performance and better access to Google Play Services.

I have to admit that this is a brilliant move by Google. In one sweep, they have put the might of the formidable Android ecosystem behind ChromeOS. Well done. Chrome OS is instantly comparable to Linux and Windows if it can run native apps.

VLC is coming to Chrome OS soon thanks to ARC. Anandtech has tried out the beta version and it is coming along nicely. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;9082&#x2F;the-chromebook-pixel-2015-review&#x2F;5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;9082&#x2F;the-chromebook-pixel-2015...</a>

Here&#x27;s hoping this is eventually gets made into a standalone library or program that can be run without Chrome. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, Chrome definitely has some benefits over other browsers, but I don&#x27;t want to have to have it to use this and I definitely don&#x27;t want to have to run a browser to use apps.

Coming from OSX development, I read this as &quot;Google&#x27;s Automatic Reference Counting&quot; and was thinking that it would be pretty sweet.

<i>&quot;ARC runs Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS thanks to Native Client (abbreviated &quot;NaCL&quot;). NaCL is a Chrome sandboxing technology that allows Chrome apps and plugins to run at &quot;near native&quot; speeds&quot;</i><p>Straight out of the MS playbook, &#x27;lets use our dominant browser as a pincer move to gain developer&#x2F;market share&#x27;.

On the one hand this is really awesome because by opening ChromeOS up to Android apps it becomes much more useful.<p>The other side of the medal is that this might slow down progress on the open web-platform as developers would rather develop a native android app than put effort to make a web-app.<p>It somehow funny: Recent developments around the web platform (service workers, etc) are supposed to make web-apps compete with native apps and even Microsoft is starting to embrace this (web based skype). At the same time now native apps run in the web. It will be interesting how to this will evolve.<p>It also shows why Google developed NaCL and that it doesn&#x27;t really matter that it hasn&#x27;t been adopted by other browsers. Because its main use case is for ChromeOS.

Sigh. We need this going the other way around; that is, our mobile devices supporting web-apps, instead of our browsers supporting mobile apps.<p>ARC is going to be the next Flash(TM). And now developers still have to target multiple platforms (web, android, ios), instead of just the web.

The only issue is having a unified design system that is optimized for larger-screen, mouse and keyboard devices.

Just when I thought I&#x27;d rid myself of Java...

I&#x27;ve been wanting the android kindle app on Mac for a while. It is so much better than the Mac app.

If this means Microsoft&#x27;s Office Apps for Android (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook) come over to Chrome OS and Google manages to integrate them in a nice fashion - Microsoft has one more headache to deal with.<p>That aside, this will seriously increase the appeal of Chromebooks - who doesn&#x27;t want a simple, secure platform that can run all the bazillion Android apps? Google just needs to pay some more attention to Chrome OS desktop interface - it is shitty frankly.

&quot;Write once, run everywhere&quot; is the web applications promise. Unfortunately we have a lot of work to do to make web applications comparable to native apps.

As a marketer, this allows me to manage social accounts like Instagram and Vine from the desktop env. In fact, we have those two working for our team now:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@seanmdixon&#x2F;run-android-apps-in-chrome-78b2f51945b8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@seanmdixon&#x2F;run-android-apps-in-chrome-78...</a>

If only Apple will open up iOS a bit so Google can port this over...

The Google page linked from the article does not support the claim that this extends beyond ChromeOS for deployment via the Web Store -- in fact, it repeatedly says the opposite --only that the packaging and testing process works on Mac&#x2F;Windows&#x2F;Linux.

To me this seems like a hope and pray response to where Windows is heading with a heterogeneous platform strategy. What people want is high quality robust full featured applications on their mobile devices, not app store quality word processing on their laptop.<p>I already have all the Gmail and hangouts on my desktop I could ever want. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll use the Clojure REPL app in lieu of $&gt; lein repl or the Maps app in lieu of my browser. To a first approximation, apps are better than nothing but I don&#x27;t see this as a Windows 8 app killer ~ their standard of fit and finish is generally higher.<p>There&#x27;s a niche where this will be great but I don&#x27;t see an app replacing audacity or blender anytime soon.

Hrm. I converted one of my Android apps with ARC welder and uploaded it to the Chrome store but it will only install from there on Chromebooks =( Anyone know how to enable desktop distribution?

Will this support NDK apps? I don&#x27;t really care about most Android apps -- I&#x27;d rather have an HTML version, and the web is a better universal runtime than the Android API for a bunch of reasons -- but it&#x27;d be cool to be able to play Android games on a Chromebook.

I really wonder why it is only Mozilla right now that offers their browser as a tar.gz for Linux use.

Is this the reason that Chrome seems be getting extremely bloated on the desktop? It&#x27;s like running a ChromeOS VM with every chrome.exe process. I guess it&#x27;s time to go back to Firefox or try Spartan.

Is there any project under way to translate PNaCl code to asm.js?<p>Edit: reading further, PNaCl happens to be a subset of LLVM IR. The Emscripten code could probably be repurposed to run NaCl and thus Android apps everywhere.

So where can I see a list of Android apps which I can run on my Mac?

Looking forward to porting my FOSS newsreader over. Nice work, this.

Are there any code changes necessary to get your app to work on this? When I run my APK I just get a white screen with the app logo in the center.

Java&#x27;s Write once Run Anywhere is live in spite of Sun&#x27;s Failure. I just hope Oracle makes up with Google for Java&#x27;s Sake.<p>Google is the only reason Java is not a dying Language.

I&#x27;ve been writing a lot of Go lately and this makes me pretty excited. The Go developers have put some effort in to getting Go working well on Android, with accompanying OpenGL related libraries[0]. If those apps really do work well on desktops now that&#x27;d be great.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;godoc.org&#x2F;golang.org&#x2F;x&#x2F;mobile" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;godoc.org&#x2F;golang.org&#x2F;x&#x2F;mobile</a>

Why would I want to run Android apps on any device?