Running Android apps in Chrome on desktop is huge! I'm glad that the ARC runtime I provided in https://github.com/vladikoff/chromeos-apk/issues/5 helped to achieve this.
Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
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Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#72Running Android apps in Chrome on desktop is huge! I'm glad that the ARC runtime I provided in https://github.com/vladikoff/chromeos-apk/issues/5 helped to achieve this.
#humblebrag
Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#73So, now we can write apps in Angular that run on the web and compile to Java so that we can install them to Android, running on ChromeOS, running on OSX. Brilliant. Edit: Perhaps the punny nature of this is deserving of downvotes, but the statement above is the actual use case I presented to a co-developer, discussing how this project could be of use to our app, which was built with Ionic. FWIW, there's value in it (…
Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#74Can anyone explain how this differs from using an Android emulator? ( http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html ) Is it a matter of features, speed, or convenience? Obviously, all of those can be overcome, be it as a fork of the official emulator or as a third-party emulator. For instance, this new Chrome extension must be the same thing under the hood: a Dalvik runtime, possibly an ARM->Intel recompiler…
It's been a few years since I dared run the official emulator, and I used to have an underpowered computer for development, but last time it took about 10 minutes to boot Android and another 2-3 minutes to open an app. I presume it's been improved since then and runs nicer on better hardware, but my first impulse is that speed is a huge concern in Android emulation. Convenience only matters if speed is solved, but th…
This is why I loved developing for Firefox OS. Their simulator is really just Gecko inside a smaller window and with simulated touch events. You could do some amazing things, such as live-inspect DOM on a connected device and treat it as if it were a local webpage. And now the WebIDE built into Firefox seems to be even more pleasant. I even used to sometimes test the app in my Firefox browser, without bothering to connect a device or fire up the simulator. It was super-speedy.
I'm so sad Firefox OS is probably never going to properly take off. I use Android and like it very much, but development for it is a literal nightmare.
Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#75Can anyone explain how this differs from using an Android emulator? ( http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html ) Is it a matter of features, speed, or convenience? Obviously, all of those can be overcome, be it as a fork of the official emulator or as a third-party emulator. For instance, this new Chrome extension must be the same thing under the hood: a Dalvik runtime, possibly an ARM->Intel recompiler…
I've just tried it with my own apps.
Features - it is missing logging of any sort, so when an app crashes you don't know why. You can't use adb logcat nor presumably connect a debugger (I just use logcat most of the time anyway). e.g. an app I'm working on crashes when trying to use the "share" feature. this is probably to be expected, but without a log or anything it's tricky to know why. A game I made uses the NDK and despite having the x86 version of the library in the APK, it crashes on startup.
Speed - this is the killer feature! The emulator is useless (at least on Linux) as the native drivers cause it to hang IME, the startup time is too large, and when running an app is too slow to really judge its usage. You can use the emulator in a pinch, but better to test on devices. This means plugging them in and swapping devices (first world problems ;), which is a bit of a pain.
Convenience - the regular build-install-debug cycle is incorporated into the Android build system, whereas with this solution you have to faff about running your own scripts to execute chromeos-apk on the APK, then install by hand from the extensions screen. However you can debug right on the same PC without having to have a phone or tablet available.
So the main difference is speed and a bit of convenience. It is as fast as running the app on a real Android device, without having to have one handy. I can see why Google didn't release this for all apps yet, as there are a lot of places that it crashes out. But it's really cool that this works at all, and I'm sure it'll only get better.
Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#76I have had some success running Android x86 (http://www.android-x86.org/) in VirtualBox.
Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#77Hope this means good netflix support in Linux.
Netflix should work on Linux natively (at least in Ubuntu) very soon http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/09/netflix-linux-html5-nss-c...
Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#78How is this really good? Android apps are really good but they are designed for touch interface on mobile devices, not desktop.
Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#79Can anyone explain how this differs from using an Android emulator? ( http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html ) Is it a matter of features, speed, or convenience? Obviously, all of those can be overcome, be it as a fork of the official emulator or as a third-party emulator. For instance, this new Chrome extension must be the same thing under the hood: a Dalvik runtime, possibly an ARM->Intel recompiler…
I've just tried it with my own apps. Features - it is missing logging of any sort, so when an app crashes you don't know why. You can't use adb logcat nor presumably connect a debugger (I just use logcat most of the time anyway). e.g. an app I'm working on crashes when trying to use the "share" feature. this is probably to be expected, but without a log or anything it's tricky to know why. A game I made uses the NDK…
Slight update, if you set `"enableAdb" : true` in the app's manifest.json, then you can connect adb and view the log. This makes the whole thing miles better than the emulator.
Re: Chromeos-apk – Run Android APKs on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux and Windows
#80This is amazing. There's a long reddit thread and some additional instructions here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2gv035/you_can_now_... From the README: > Soundcloud - Works, crashes when playing sound Funny definition of 'works'.
I guess that "works" just means "starts".
That's like a winedb entry that says "game works" followed by "crashes after intro video"!