Chromebooks were designed to keep up with you on the go – they’re thin and light, have long battery lives, resume instantly, and are easy to use. Today, we’re making Chromebooks even more mobile by bringing the first set of Android apps to Chrome OS.
These first apps are the result of a project called the App Runtime for Chrome (Beta), which we announced earlier this summer at Google I/O. Over the coming months, we’ll be working with a select group of Android developers to add more of your favorite apps so you’ll have a more seamless experience across your Android phone and Chromebook.
I was under the impression all applications would work when they announced this at I/O. I had no idea only select applications would work. That’s a bit of a bummer.
google has probably limited the runtime like they did with the chromecast.
outside of mandatory GPL requirements Google seems to be more interested in locking people in than ever before.
Apart from F/OSS OSes on traditional desktops and servers, there are no truly open platforms anymore. Mozilla is trying with FirefoxOS, and it’s a noble effort, but it’s a non-starter. The ARM ecosystem is full of binary blobs and NDAs, and mobile is wrapped up tight by Apple, Google, and Microsoft with their closed systems.
I’m not a GNU evangelist; I actually prefer licenses like BSD, MIT, and Apache. But I’m starting to think Richard Stallman was right about a whole lot more than I gave him credit for. Certainly, the opportunity for an open, publicly audited, safe from subversion mobile OS is out of our reach at this stage.
Except the kernel that Google is using for their mobile OS is GPLv2, the license that RMS helped write. And yet here we are with mass use of binary blobs in conjunction with this GPLv2 kernel.
iphamlore,
I wonder if Stallman regrets any of his earlier assumptions. Open source is great, he saw that. But the benefits become extremely limited when consumer devices are so restricted, locked down and tivoized such that owners are no longer in direct control of the software on their hardware. I think he would agree with this.
To me, the consolidation of corporate control is the single most troubling trend for the future of tech. Open hardware is just as important as open software. A typical response I’ve gotten to this is – just root/jailbreaking your own devices. However owners shouldn’t have to hack into their own hardware for access. And as security vulnerabilities get fixed and enforcement gets driven into the hardware itself, unauthorized modifications will become less viable (at least without a hardware mod). Even if unlocked hardware remains available for niche users, it won’t be enough to reverse the damage to the general software ecosystem. Independent developers will struggle to overcome the reality that their isolated islands will not be reachable by the masses due to artificially imposed hardware lockouts.
I hope I’m wrong about this future, but it seems to me that without some kind of course correction, it’s where we are headed.
We have always had open source, it just didn’t had a license attached to it.
What Stallman missed is that companies will never buy into GPL, even LGPL. This lead to the rise of more permissive licenses that just made the situation no different than before GPL existed.
Companies can take the code they see somewhere on the Net, and just contribute anything back if they feel like it.
Legal free software (no need to pay for), free developers and no need to reveal the company secrets afterwards.
In a capitalist world where every cent counts this is a corporation dream.
Stallman also missed the rise of patent litigation. What is the use of having the code available if you can get sued by using it?
So we are back to the world of magazine code listings and public domain.
moondevil,
I generally agree.
Except in a way, we are not. That world existed in an era of open PCs (IBM/tandy/commodore/apple/bbc/etc). As households make the transition to consumption devices with restricted platforms(#1), we loose the capability for amateurs to implement magazine code at home or try out live-cds (Thank you http://www.linuxjournal.com/ – many fond memories!).
#1 It’s difficult to tell whether this is in fact happening. Are tablets/mobiles actually displacing household PCs in large numbers?
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2011/connected-devices-h…
Another question I have about the future is if the home PC itself remains open in the coming decade, or if it will become more restricted (ala metro/secureboot/kernel DRM/…)?
Edited 2014-09-12 13:54 UTC
GPL 3 was the revision to address tivoization, and of course many of the anti-rms types again jumped down his throat and swung on his tonsils. But again he accurately foresaw the counter-move by proprietary software advocates (patents and encrypted boot loaders) and took action rather than helplessly wringing his hands.
As long as Chrome OS apps don’t depend on proprietary extensions, I suppose Firefox OS will be the FOSS standard bearer in mobile for a while. I had hopes that Ubuntu might provide a good Gnu Linux for mobile, but they seem to have fallen prey to Second System Syndrome. Rats.
True, but that is exactly the reason why some projects moved away from GPL to other licenses.
There was a presentation from a FSF lawyer last year about the lost of importance of GPL among open source projects and what could be done about it.
Agree. My point is that moving away from it wasn’t such a great idea if you don’t want to have your computing environment controlled by international corporations.
Yeah, RMS regrets GPL v2, which is why GPL v3 exists.
Isn’t there some kind of natural law about Richard Stallman being right again?
Given the recent reports about all the Android Apps that contain Malware do you really want to risk infecting your nice and pristine Chromebook with a lost of crap?
Won’t that be like going back to a laptop running Windows XP with no service packs or Anti-Virus installed?
If there is a key USP that I’m missing then I’d be happy for someone to explain it. To me, running my Phone/Tablet with a different OS/ecosystem is a no brainer (eggs all in one basket and all that) but hey, what do I know.
Edited 2014-09-12 05:48 UTC
I think you missed the part where only select apps approved by Google get to run on the Chromebook.
shotsman,
Why is this different than any other android device? And shouldn’t this be the owner’s choice anyways? As long as google makes it easy to revert the chromebook to pristine condition, I really don’t see a problem.
I hope that this is merely part of a multi-staged phase in, to aid in initial testing, rather than a new strategy for google to control what is allowed to be installed.
I see this differently.
Chromeos was meant to be a driver of web technologies with ultimate goal of turning the web into universal, all encompassing application platform supporting all but specialistic uses on desktop.
The inclusion of generic rich native application API on this system would account to admitting the whole idea is a failure.
I believe that’s why Google wants only a limited set of Android apps on it, to serve an interim purpose of patching some missing functionalities that users of this ever more popular platform demand now.
But it’s not going to turn into “Androidbook”.
You mean like Javascript?
Take the Android-framework, integrate it into Chrome, name it HTML6, w3c approves, done.
Fuck Google!
I think it is not a limitation in the runtime. Android is optimized for touch. Google wants to make sure that there will be a good experience with a mouse and keyboard. I know, I have an Asus TF700 and some apps could be improved quite a bit for the keyboard and mouse.
Could be, but my Acer C720P does touch quite well! I didn’t think touch would be that useful, but I use it heavily for pinch-zoom-positioning, scrolling, and the occasional touch-friendly web app interface. I suspect it will handle most Android apps just fine.
Just because a few apps are being shepherded into the Chromebook doesn’t mean they are going to forever cherry-pick. It could simply mean that they want to get the API right for supporting Android apps on ChromeOS before opening it to the masses and getting gobs of “Google didn’t think this through” criticism.
At least on the page to submit an app for consideration they aren’t ruling out everything yet.
http://www.chromebook.com/newapps
“We won^aEURTMt be able to support every Android app from day one, but your feedback will help us focus on the Android apps that you^aEURTMd use most on Chrome OS.”
when Android games are gonna appear on ChromeOS. Other than Kongregate, there are very few games on ChromeOS. It won’t net them full Minecraft. But for some, Minecraft Pocket edition will help with their addiction.
Once the issues are solved. And a little supplication at developers to update their apps to have proper mouse/keyboard capability. This is going to make a droves of people happy.
Sadly, we’re not there yet with Web apps, so this stop gap is necessary.
Games and Skype …and a lot of people would be covered.