Although the Android operating system has fought back and forth with Apple’s iOS in the mobile device market, the company’s web-centric Chrome OS desktop platform is difficult to compare with Microsoft Windows or Apple’s macOS in terms of applied ecology. The good news is that Google is working to bring more software to Chromebooks, building on years of cultivating the education market.
The Mountain View-based tech giant has previously allowed a slew of Android apps (and even Linux apps) to run on the Chrome OS operating system. However, outside of mobile phones /tablets, the experience of using Android Apps on other large-screen devices (such as netbooks) is still not good.
SlashGear points out that while tablets predate many smartphones, Android was originally built for mobile devices with fairly small screens. Properly optimized, it can only display a limited number of items on the screen at a time. Even with so-called split-screen/multitasking capabilities, OEMs still need to carefully consider the actual screen size of the device and the one-handed interaction experience.
Embarrassingly, Android tablets fall into exactly this dilemma. And since the market isn’t that lucrative, developer interest isn’t high either. By contrast, things are a little different for Chrome OS.
According to data disclosed by ChromeOS.dev, the usage of Android Apps increased by 50% last year, even though there is still much room for improvement in the performance of apps on the platform.
Even better, with the arrival of a new version of the official Android development tools, developers will be able to say goodbye to laborious ways to easily ensure their apps work smoothly on devices like Chromebooks.
It is reported that one of the problems running Android applications on tablets, especially Chrome OS, is that they have difficulty in correctly adjusting their user interface (UI) and displayed content when the window is resized.
The reason is that developers don’t have an easy way to verify this different behavior unless they already have Chromebook hardware on hand to run the tests. But even so, they intelligently deploy the app to the device before running the test, rather than debugging it at any time during the development process.
The good news is that the upcoming release of a new version of the Android Studio integrated development environment (codenamed Electric Eel) promises to give developers all the tools they need to get things right.
Android Police pointed out that desktop Android virtual devices can act like emulators, allowing developers to test the behavior of their applications when resizing windows and so on.
And covers notes on how a particular app works with other apps in multi-window mode, how notifications will be displayed, and not so much on a smartphone/tablet. This means that Android apps on Chrome OS will run more properly and smoothly in the near future.
Obviously, with the advancement of the Android 12L project, which focuses on large-screen devices, Google also hopes that the new version of Android Studio can bring greater assistance to the development of Chrome OS / PC mode.