A developer that goes by the handle Vladikoff has tweaked Google's App Runtime for Chrome (ARC) to allow any Android app to run on any major desktop operating system, not just the handful announced last week which were also limited to Chrome OS. His tweaked version of ARC is re-packaged as ARChon.md. The install isn't very straightforward, and you have to be in developer mode on Chrome. But there's a support forum on reddit. The extension will work on any OS running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up as long as the user also installs chromeos-apk, which converts raw Android app packages (APKs) to a Chrome extension. Ars Technica reports that apps run this way are buggy, fast, and crash often but expresses optimism for when Google officially "opens the floodgates on the Play Store, putting 1.3 million Android apps onto nearly every platform.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @05:04PM
I want to virtualize my phone. Run each individual app in a VM on a machine at home or perhaps in the cloud.
Some of the benefits:
1) Reduced CPU and memory requirements for the phone
2) Fully isolate each app from everything else, so no snooping on my addressbook, no risks of data contamination with BYOD for work
3) More control over the IP address, I can run each app through individual VPNs if I really wanted to
4) No worries about losing control of my data if someone gets a hold of my phone (like the cops)
Downsides:
1) Additional complexity (although good software could hide most of it)
2) Needs good network connectivity, 4G or wifi pretty much all the time (not a problem for most people in urban and suburban areas)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Sunday September 21 2014, @05:09PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @05:13PM
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday September 21 2014, @05:16PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:49PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Sunday September 21 2014, @10:28PM
May I add a sub-downside to #2?
2a. Data caps are a thing that exists.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @06:36PM
It's amazing that he's managed to reproduce the genuine Android experience then. Buggy, fast, and crash often.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday September 21 2014, @07:42PM
If this works, maybe in a year or two, and Android apps can run on any Chrome browser, Android apps could become the new de facto standard app architecture. In essence, the original promise of Java's applets. Java applets never took off because they were freaking-super-slow on 1997-era computers, the GUI experience of AWT and Swing were both abominable (to use and to program), and were dead as people moved to HTML-based web apps.
Now, in 2014, web apps are a royal pain to develop with layer after layer of crud. Look at your typical J2EE crud-o-rama, where the average JSP page can have HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, scriptlets, taglets, and whatever else, while your back-end collapses under the weight of an MVC framework, an ORM framework, and a million other dependencies like maybe EJBs. The J2EE complexity level is so high it's becoming hard to work with, and hard for developers to keep in their heads. From what I've read about Microsoft's web crud-o-rama, it's as bad or worse. (But I quit reading when I saw "run on server" because I couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance.)
Android gives you the UI toolkit you need to build sophisticated apps, and has JSON and SOAP support to talk to web services. Android makes doing what J2EE is supposed to do something like 1000x easier. You're doing an end run around the over-engineered mess of web applications.
I see a lot of potential here for Android apps to become the lingua franca of the Internet.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:04PM
I don't particularly like the idea, but it's still so much better than the JavaScript hellhole we get to deal with now.
If adopting Android apps in such a way means the end of JavaScript, then I'm all for it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:48PM
"Now, in 2014, web apps are a royal pain to develop with layer after layer of crud."
Drop the crud => problem fixed?
For most stuff, simple html suffices. For interactive maps perhaps javascript or java is needed. But the rest can be blamed on webhipsters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:59PM
> I see a lot of potential here for Android apps to become the lingua franca of the Internet.
I hope not. Every release of Android Google makes more of the API closed-source.
What we have now absolutely has problems, but making the internet dependent on a closed-source binary blob is what we all went crazy trying to stop Microsoft from doing.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday September 21 2014, @09:35PM
Personally I don' see much benefit of this when you must package an Android app in Chrome, and finally put all of that on your desktop OS.
By adding Chrome, which arguably has a larger attack target than Android, you are providing the individual APKs a far more powerful platform than android itself provided. Further, Chrome leaks information [spideroak.com] much more than most people think, (as do most browsers).
So without locking Chrome into some sort of jail you can't be sure of anything. (Remember, Chrome's sandboxing is designed to protect one instance from another, not necessarily protecting your machine and it's resources from chrome).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday September 22 2014, @02:00PM
more importantly, this might make the Linux desktop truly ubiquitous.
Android is already running linux. If I could have every App run in its own box, this would make me a great deal more comfortable to use webapps.
The fact it is in chrome is nice, but I'll wait to see it in chromium...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:38PM
Will the apps works without that capability in the hardware?
BTW, the number I saw the other day said 0.4 percent. [theregister.co.uk]
Is it any wonder Tiles8 isn't getting more love?
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by Username on Monday September 22 2014, @01:16AM
Why not just use the emulator that comes with the android SDK?
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday September 22 2014, @02:00AM
It's actually a true emulator and is quite slow.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday September 23 2014, @07:52PM
Unusably slow on an i5 with 4 gigs. :( No, you won't be running youtube app or wwe app and actually be able to watch even low def video.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A