MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. — You can officially stop calling Android Google’s mobile operating system: That operating system and its selection of 1.5 million or so apps will soon arrive on laptops and desktops running Google’s Chrome OS.
The news came during a presentation at the Alphabet, Inc. (GOOG) subsidiary’s I/O conference here Thursday morning.
"Apps have become a central part of our everyday lives," said Kan Liu, director of product management for Chrome OS. "We're bringing the Play Store to Chromebooks."
How this will work
When Google ships this option to Chromebooks, you’ll see a Play Store icon in the usual Chrome OS taskbar. (This option ships in June for users of three recent models running the development version of Chrome OS, later this year for everyday users on a much wider selection of Chromebook laptops and a few Chromebox desktops.)
That should let you install almost any Android app, which will then run in its own window. And unlike most of the web apps that until now have represented the core of the browser-based Chrome OS, most Android apps can run offline.
Google is still testing how well this Android support will work on older Chromebooks, but Liu said after the presentation he expects anything shipped within the last two years to pass muster.
Chrome OS was never built to run separate apps like this, and Android apps aren’t coded to run on laptops. To deal with this issue, Chrome OS keeps Android apps in a separate container that allows them to act as if they’re just on a phone that happens to have a larger screen and attached keyboard.
This gets around one potential hangup with Android apps: Many of them don’t yet support the automatic backup system Google introduced with last year’s Marshmallow update. Instead, Chrome’s own sync engine will ensure they stay current from one Chromebook to the next.
Some Android apps may still not run if they require hardware not found in current Chromebooks; in those cases, the Play Store won’t let you install the app — something that can already happen on Android phones and tablets.
Google executives here suggested we’d soon see some Chromebooks adding phone-like features such as GPS to remedy that issue.
If you don’t want any of this complexity — a real possibility, especially in business and educational markets that prize the assured simplicity of Chrome OS — you can decline all of it. Organizations can also allow only specified Android apps.
What could that mean to Chrome OS — and Android
Liu led off the presentation by bragging a little about Chrome OS’s success since its 2009 introduction: In the first quarter of 2016, according to statistics from the research firm IDC, Chrome OS shipments outpaced OS X shipments.