Google has decided to go mainstream with Chrome's Android Runtime. The company has welcomed uber apps such as VLC to its Chrome OS, which means that with Chromebooks, a deluge of Android apps will automatically appear in the web store.
Android Runtime for Chrome is a complementary pack to its "Packaged apps" or "Chrome apps" that were launched in 2013, the PC World reported. However, while a "packaged" app might just be a glorified set of web applications, employees of Google said that apps made with ARC can act more like an Android app's native port.
Google's product manager, Josh Woodward said, "Basically, we created the project to fill in some of the app gap, which has always been sort of the ding on Chromebooks. As more and more Android tablets have come into the market, there have been many nicer, full-screen-sized apps. So we thought-this is kind of crazy-what if we could run an unmodified APK file, an Android app, on Chrome OS?"
Unlike Chrome's packaged apps that are heading towards developers who are working with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript technologies, ARC is aiming at Android devices' developers who have chosen to run the native code.
Meanwhile, the video player app VLC now joins Chrome with a promise of playing all videos in just about every video format, unlike other competing similar platforms, the Tech Hive reported.
To date, Android apps like Sight Words, Duolingo, Vine, and Evernote have jumped over to Chrome OS; however, apps like Dropbox still points to its mother website.
Woodward has, also, shared that they are now in negotiations with OverDrive- the eBook distributor, and Kindle.