Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

chrome.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 208 posts

Re: Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

#181

Post by DanBC »

imtringued wrote: post #177
stephenr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what's inherently so bad about "being a google user". Having every facet of your digital life mined for personal data, for the sake of a mega-corp's bottom line? > If the only hypothetical disadvantage you're thinking about it is "Google might shut down one day" Not at all. Its actually more likely "Google might stop supporting X, Y or Z that you depend on".. They, you know, have a history of doing tha…

The only problem with "data mining" is the government, not corporations. The corporations use that data to only do one single thing: give you personalised ads. However the government could pass new laws and prosecute you for things you have done 20 years ago on the internet.

That's a particular viewpoint that isn't shared by, for example, Europe, where my data is mine, and a corporation gets to use it with my permission. They need to tell me that they gather it, and why they gather it, and what they do with it, and they have to only keep it for as long as necessary.

There are protections for me if a corporation sells my data without my permission or misuses my data.

Re: Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

#184

Post by beefield »

imtringued wrote: post #177
stephenr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what's inherently so bad about "being a google user". Having every facet of your digital life mined for personal data, for the sake of a mega-corp's bottom line? > If the only hypothetical disadvantage you're thinking about it is "Google might shut down one day" Not at all. Its actually more likely "Google might stop supporting X, Y or Z that you depend on".. They, you know, have a history of doing tha…

The only problem with "data mining" is the government, not corporations. The corporations use that data to only do one single thing: give you personalised ads. However the government could pass new laws and prosecute you for things you have done 20 years ago on the internet.

Is there something stopping these corporations to do anything else with the data? I can imagine recruiters willing to pay on some educational information/analysis. I can also imagine corporations selling credit rating information based on the data on the individuals they have. And these were after thinking about 25 seconds of possible valuable use cases on data.

Re: Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

#185

Post by piyush_soni »

stephenr wrote: post #162
piyush_soni wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what's inherently so bad about "being a google user". It's mostly paranoia. If the only hypothetical disadvantage you're thinking about it is "Google might shut down one day", then you're not thinking about a very near future. If the TV channels shut down tomorrow, your TVs effectively stop working too, you still buy them. There are hundreds of such devices out there, which you buy because it's pretty ev…

> I don't know what's inherently so bad about "being a google user". Having every facet of your digital life mined for personal data, for the sake of a mega-corp's bottom line? > If the only hypothetical disadvantage you're thinking about it is "Google might shut down one day" Not at all. Its actually more likely "Google might stop supporting X, Y or Z that you depend on".. They, you know, have a history of doing tha…

All the places where you have taken "you" literally as yourself, I didn't mean that. I meant people in general.

And I wrote "a lot", not "all" the things will keep on working Chromebook (in an hypothetical situation Google shuts down).

> Right, because apps designed to work on a mobile phone, which generally has it's own data connection independent of whether wifi is available or not, will just naturally assume they need to work offline. Good luck with that.

Yes, the same mobile phones which also have an airplane mode.

Re: Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

#186

Post by imtringued »

Nullabillity wrote: post #20
sharms wrote: post #6

This is a big move and will majorly impact desktop / laptop computing. Now the entire ecosystem of Android apps (even Microsoft Office, Snapchat, Photoshop Express) is going to be available, and arguably this platform is much more complete than say, Universal Apps (Microsoft)

All mobile applications, regardless of platform, are inherently crippled. It's not as bad as iOS (at least there are user-accessible generic files...), but there's still a lot of stuff that's crippled because of crap like "simplicity" or "we don't have enough screen real estate".

Not to mention that my fingers are huge.

Re: Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

#187

Post by gman99 »

chrisper wrote: post #96

Is there a way to try out ChromeOS without owning a chromebook?

x86 builds: http://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/

You can boot from USB and give it a whirl. There are some closed source bits missing, so I'm unsure if, for eg, netflix, will work. But it'll give you a feel for the OS

Re: Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

#188

Post by imtringued »

cozzyd wrote: post #93
old-gregg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could not agree more. Electron apps do not feel like desktop apps at all, they're closer to VMs in how they start, how they stop and how much resources they require.

For some reason that I do not care enough to figure out, the Slack "native" Linux application uses something like 5 GB of RAM on my desktop.

Maybe it's time to upgrade your laptop /s

Re: Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

#189

Post by discordance »

stephenr wrote: post #162
piyush_soni wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what's inherently so bad about "being a google user". It's mostly paranoia. If the only hypothetical disadvantage you're thinking about it is "Google might shut down one day", then you're not thinking about a very near future. If the TV channels shut down tomorrow, your TVs effectively stop working too, you still buy them. There are hundreds of such devices out there, which you buy because it's pretty ev…

> I don't know what's inherently so bad about "being a google user". Having every facet of your digital life mined for personal data, for the sake of a mega-corp's bottom line? > If the only hypothetical disadvantage you're thinking about it is "Google might shut down one day" Not at all. Its actually more likely "Google might stop supporting X, Y or Z that you depend on".. They, you know, have a history of doing tha…

> Its actually more likely "Google might stop supporting X, Y or Z that you depend on".. They, you know, have a history of doing that.

For example, Google Reader.

Re: Play Store and Android Apps Coming to Chromebooks

#190

Post by jalami »

simula67 wrote: post #157
jalami wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on the adoption, although I still don't think it's moving our public institutions in the right direction. It's really just moving a lot more kids into a walled garden. I know Google has been in hot water for collecting student data recently and has since taken steps to fix it. That's their primary business model though. " Anonymizing " promises always follow and then it's a trust game again. I can see a futu…

> Google is more interested in getting people into the garden than it is in selling hardware or fostering education All for-profit companies are interested in turning a profit. No company would be interested in fostering education, no matter what they say. The question is whether their profit motives are harmful to the education. The larger point here is about the dangers of the cloud. Google could chose not to allow…

I agree with you. Their cloud is really the danger in this relationship. Educators should use products and services whose business model doesn't hamper their ability to remain in control of their students' education. I didn't mean to come off as saying Google isn't sincere and another company with similar offerings would be. It's business.

I think it will get beyond individual school/department lock-in though. Steam, for example, hasn't simply locked-in consumers to their purchases and made it difficult to transition away. Developers are often locked in because they rely on Steam for match-making, piracy-busting, cloud saving, achievements apis, server-hosting, modding support, etc. etc. All of this offloaded centralization is easier than doing it yourself and more like the console's devs are used to. If you want a AAA PC game, you're more than likely going to get it exclusively on Steam.

Android is already there, many/most of the apps require Google's services for even mainline functionality and definitely for consumer discovery. Google education could be next if it gets adopted like Google Analytics as the de-facto api, educators would have no choice in the matter. All good products use Google's apis for everything.

Post reply on HN