Chrome OS is 10 years old, and it doesn’t seem to hear them at all. Indeed, he has never been as fit as he is now, certainly driven by distance learning but also by the maturity of the offer. The many Chromebooks sold this year are tangible proof of this, despite the push, perhaps, has been waning in recent months due to a market that is starting to be saturated ( and the chip crisis certainly does not help).
Users are looking for bigger and bigger displays, but they have no intention of giving up the apps they find on their smartphones. Google is convinced of this that – numbers in hand – shows how the large screen-Android app combination is actually characterizing the market. Starting with Chrome OS, which grew almost double (92%) in just one year, up to the use of Android apps on Chromebooks, which increased by 50% in the last 12 months.
The Mountain View company has clear ideas: to bring the Android experience to displays of different sizes and shapes. After all, the recent release of Android 12L seems to be going in this direction. To help you create apps that are suitable for all screens and form factors, we have continued to share new tools and guidelines throughout 2021, recalls Google, which summarizes the situation:
THE MAIN NEWS THAT HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE GROWTH
- Android 11: The update touches all Chromebooks
- With Chrome OS 93+, Chromebooks running Android 11 can automatically run mobile apps in a locked window with smartphone or tablet display orientation. Users can disable the window management feature by re-enabling full resizing with the “Resizable” option
- Nearby Share: The feature for quick sharing of images, files and links is available for apps on Chrome OS starting with Chrome 96. Compatibility is for both Android 9 and Android 11
- The Jetpack Compose 1.0 UI toolkit was created to create adaptive layouts: ” the appearance of the user interface is described in the code, which means that developers can easily decide at runtime how to render an app on different screen sizes “
- Android Studio Chipmunk helps developers by supporting them in creating adaptive layouts. Tests are planned for four types of devices: smartphone, foldable, tablet, desktop
- Tools for the use of a stylus that exploit APIs capable of minimizing latency by rendering the stroke with the hardware composer, predicting where the next stroke will be drawn
- Using the Unity engine for games on Chrome OS: support for x86 and x86_64 devices