Hopefully will Android apps now finally be optimized for larger displays when they can run on Chrome OS

Android and Chrome OS
Android and Chrome OS

On this year's Google I/O Google announced that the Play Store and Android apps are coming to Chrome OS and Chromebooks. And personally I think that is a brilliant way to finally make Chromebooks interesting. It will change everything for Chrome OS and Chromebooks.

Having Android apps running on Chromebooks with full performance and support for mouse, keyboard and Touch will take Chromebooks to a higher level. Android has some good apps1, and there is some Ok Markdown text editors so I can probably blog with ease, but not so many good video editing apps though so that could still be a problem.

But I believe that Android apps for Chrome OS could finally make Android apps optimized for larger displays. Android has almost no apps that is optimized for tablets and larger displays. I mean with sidebars and other features that makes the experience better on a larger display. Like so many iPad apps has. Android apps looks like blown-up smartphone apps on tablets. Even worse on laptops.

I mean look at Google Apps for example, they usually are just a large slab of a surface, only one column to work in no matter how large display the device you use has. No optimizations for larger displays at all. And it's the same with practically all Android apps.

So hopefully Android apps on Chromebooks will change that and push developers to optimize their apps for larger displays so that the experience gets better.

Now we only need to see a really mobile and portable Chromebook to make me very interesting in buying one ;)

Here are two videos I made about this:

  1. Not as many good and professional as iOS has though. ↩︎