Skip to main content

Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers



If you remember, about a week ago, Google gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps through the "App Runtime for Chrome." The release came with a lot of limitations—it only worked with certain apps and only worked on Chrome OS. But a developer by the name of "Vladikoff" has slowly been stripping away these limits. First he figured out how to load any app on Chrome OS, instead of just the four that are officially supported. Now he's made an even bigger breakthrough and gotten Android apps to work on any desktop OS that Chrome runs on. You can now run Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The hack depends on App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which is built using Native Client, a Google project that allows Chrome to run native code safely within a web browser. While ARC was only officially released as an extension on Chrome OS, Native Client extensions are meant to be cross-platform. The main barrier to entry is obtaining ARC Chrome Web Store, which flags desktop versions of Chrome as "incompatible."

Vladikoff made a custom version of ARC, called ARChon, that can be sideloaded simply by dragging the file onto Chrome. It should get Android apps up and running on any platform running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up. The hard part is getting Android apps that are compatible with it. ARC doesn't run raw Android app packages (APKs)—they need to be converted into a Chrome extension—but Vladikoff has a tool called "chromeos-apk" that will take care of that, too.
Everything is done through Chrome's extension APIs. Google's original runtime is an extension, ARChon is an extension, and all the apps are extensions. This makes the install process a little complicated. You'll have to enable "developer mode" on Chrome and install a bunch of unpacked extensions. Instructions are in Vladikoff's tools, and there is a whole new subreddit, called /r/chromeapks, that will get you up and running and even has some pre-converted APKs to try out



We managed to get a few Android apps running in Mac OS X; while it is a cludgy hack, it's definitely impressive. So what is it actually like to use? Crashy. It's really fast, but the lack of Google Services running in the background means a lot of apps don't work. Twitter, for instance, would frequently crash due to the lack of Google Play Services. Google's runtime for Chrome is also still in beta for a reason, and the fact that there are only four officially sanctioned apps means there is probably more work to do on Google's side, too.

The hack is a tantalizing peek into a potential future for Google, one where it turns Android into a universal runtime that works not only on Android phones, tablets, and Chrome OS devices, but on any desktop computer with Chrome installed. Native Client has always felt like Google's attempt at creating a universal runtime, and it's hard to believe that this all works by coincidence.

While this hack is buggy and crashy, at its core it works. Apps turn on and load up, and, other than some missing dependencies, they work well. It's enough to make you imagine a future when all the problems get worked out, and Google opens the floodgates on the Play Store, putting 1.3 million Android apps onto nearly every platform.

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...