Google Play Store and “over a million apps” could be headed to Chrome OS | Hacker News Reader

Google Play Store and “over a million apps” could be headed to Chrome OS

arstechnica.com

179 pointsingve166 comments

Chrome books are the best college laptops for the vast majority of students. The ability to have a ton of apps and then have the Microsoft suite on an App could really over come a few hiccups which is normally based on professors' issue of only using Word.

THE ONE ISSUE is Printing. I have to help my daughter setting up cloud printing all the time

> Chrome books are the best college laptops for the vast majority of students.

If they're not the best laptop for everybody outside of college, then they're not the best laptop for college students IMO. I wouldn't want my kids learning on something that next to nobody uses.

- How are graphics arts students supposed to learn how to use Photoshop, Illustrator and other programs that professionals actually use in the real world?

- How are CS students supposed to learn how to use the plethora of tools that don't run in ChromeOS?

- How are business students supposed to learn how to use the full Office suite, which most of the rest of the world is using on Windows or even OS X?

The "ton" of apps is kind of a moot point since Windows and Mac both also have a ton of apps.

I don't get your other point - you want to avoid issues with Word by using the "Microsoft suite on an App" (which presumably includes Word)?

> THE ONE ISSUE is Printing.

There is way more than just that one issue I think, if we're going to be completely objective here.

I find Chromebooks are increasingly good for a lot of things but, no, I doubt they're ideal for a lot of college students. (Pre-college is a somewhat different matter, especially if there's a family computer they can use for those applications that aren't accessible through a Chromebook.)

With things like Google Docs, Chromebooks are pretty powerful. I often travel with one rather than a laptop these days. But many college students are likely to run into situations where they need apps that aren't available for a Chromebook and, especially so long as Chromebooks aren't the norm, that's likely to be a problem.

I used a Chromebook as my only laptop for my last 2 years at UC Berkeley. I did all my note-taking in Google's Docs stuff. For my CS course work, I used the excellent Chrome SSH app [1] to remote into department machines. Chrome SSH is so good that I now use it on all my Windows machines instead of PuTTY!

The only thing I couldn't use my Chromebook for was for design-related activities -- running Illustrator or Photoshop to make posters or t-shirts and the like. I ended up setting up Guacamole [2] on my home network, so I could remote to my desktop windows box to use Illustrator on-the-go.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... [2] http://guac-dev.org/

If students leave college without learning any apps, I almost consider that a Good Thing. These are means, not ends.

Why? Learning how to use apps like photoshop is a good skill to have. Plus the knowledge easily translates well to other apps/mediums. Is like learning how to use an IDE and then switching to another one. At lot of the basic concepts stay the same.

Sure, lots of skills are good to have. Not at hundreds of dollars a class, though, and certainly not worth associating with a bachelor's degree. Otherwise my peers would all have degrees in Eclipse and be unemployed right now.

What a strange statement. Do you understand that for a student in graphic design or industrial design, knowing the theory is as important as knowning InDesign or AutoCAD right ? Do you understand that while you can get away with coding in a cloud IDE if you are a student in CS, some disciplines rely also on learning specific softwares which will not run on your ChromeOS computer? Or your goal is just to defend ChromeOS at all cost even with ridiculous arguments? No ChromeOS isn't the best computer for students in all disciplines.

Do these colleges not offer labs? For shame. What are people even paying them for?

Are these labs free? At the same time you don't have lectures? Are these computers actually up to date? Oh, you need to run this tool with it that requires local admin? Oh, the last guy had local admin and screwed something up?

Graphic Design or Industrial Design departments shouldn't be teaching how to use specific proprietary programs. The principles of those disciplines can be used in any of the numerous tools out there, and the real skills of a designer are transferable.

> Graphic Design or Industrial Design departments shouldn't be teaching how to use specific proprietary programs. The principles of those disciplines can be used in any of the numerous tools out there, and the real skills of a designer are transferable.

It's as idiotic as saying that future surgeons should only learn medicine theory on Chrome books. Do you not get that Graphic Design or Industrial Design departments should teach whatever is needed so that students get a job in these domains at the end of college ? Do you not get that students often have to build projects in professional conditions using professional tools ? Do you not get that you don't replace most professional tools in these domains by cheap web based knock offs ? So you clearly don't get why selling ChromeOS books to these students is wasting their money.

In theory, however the alternatives are very limited in comparison. Things like CMYK support are pretty vital when doing prepress work, but have been deemed low priority by developers of programs like GIMP. So in order to learn a huge amount of the workflow, they'd end up needing to use a program like photoshop anyways.

Um sure that single digit students who are in design they need more tools or a number of other majors. MOST students don't need to know inDesign or Photoshop or anything else.

> Um sure that single digit students who are in design they need more tools or a number of other majors. MOST students don't need to know inDesign or Photoshop or anything else.

Says who ? Did you major in Graphic Design ? no you didn't.

> Says who? Did you major in Graphic Design ? no you didn't.

I am confused are you saying I am wrong and students in Design don't need more then a Chromebook? Or they Don't Need Photoshop or in design? Or did you not read what I said when some students need more for example Design students?

Once again there are some instances for people in design for example who need more. So the MAJORITY would need more MOST don't.

If you are in engineering, computer graphics and are working on school projects I would expect people to use these tools to make their life easier. I'm not really sure what you are objecting to.

I imagine something like crouton[1] would come in handy for the CS students.

1. https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

>How are graphics arts students supposed to learn how to use Photoshop, Illustrator and other programs that professionals actually use in the real world?

Are people really PAYING to learn photoshop? Waste of money.

>How are CS students supposed to learn how to use the plethora of tools that don't run in ChromeOS?

The same way they learn to use the tools that don't run on Windows or OS X. In my experience if you go to a good college Windows is discouraged for CS in favor of Unix and professors are knowledgeable of Unix and it's limitations when it comes to running Microsoft only software. In fact for every class that I took that required some windows tool (very few) we were encouraged to use the windows machines in the computer lab. I never used anything on my laptop but Linux the whole time I was getting my degree.

I don't use chrome OS so I don't know how unixy it is though

>How are business students supposed to learn how to use the full Office suite

If you need to take a college course to learn word processing you're probably not going to be very good at running a business.

Word processors and photoshop do not require college classes to learn. They should just be a part of local community colleges that allow people to earn certificates for using office software.

> if you go to a good college Windows is discouraged for CS in favor of Unix

You realize students in architecture or graphic design don't care about your petty OS war right? and you're statement is completely false. I went to a good college and I learned both server administration on Unix and Windows.

> Are people really PAYING to learn photoshop? Waste of money.

People are paying for an education that will get them a job, if the industry mandates the use of Photoshop for a specific professional task it's in the interest of a student to learn it. And obviously you don't know Photoshop, like at all or you wouldn't say the things you're say.

> Word processors and photoshop do not require college classes to learn. They should just be a part of local community colleges that allow people to earn certificates for using office software.

You realize there is a world between learning a word processor and Photoshop for a pro usage ? no you don't. Otherwise you wouldn't say such ignorant thing.

The problem is that you are a programmer and you think every discipline works like computer science where everything is in the cloud ... it doesn't.

What percentage of the working college graduates make a dime using Photoshop?

What "Pro" Word Processor work are you talking about? Word Processors for Type Setting is horrible and the vast majority of people OVER use Word, Excel etc...

What percentage of the working college graduates make a dime using AutoCAD ? 3DS Max ? Cinema 4D ? After Effects ? Final Cut Pro ? Avid ? Illustrator ? InDesign ? Logic ? Ableton Live ? Cubase ?

On what percentage of computers running ChromeOS can you install these softwares ? ZERO .

How do people overuse Excel?

http://www.insightsquared.com/2013/12/why-excel-spreadsheets...

People use Excel when they really should use a programming Language like R or Python or other tools.

> Are people really PAYING to learn photoshop? Waste of money.

They're not paying to learn Photoshop. They're paying to learn to become professionals in a given field, and Photoshop/Illustrator/$PROGRAM are the tools-of-the-trade in that field. To pretend otherwise would be foolish.

As a computer scientist, it is embarrassing to admit this, but I have given up on wireless printing. My wife and I now physically walk to the printer and plug in via a USB cable.

What kind of printer? In my experience, networked printing is almost always much easier than USB.

I've had really good luck with Brother and Ricoh printers. From regular computers, network printing works very well (from Windows, Mac, and Linux), and their Android apps are also quite good (though they don't support the native Android printing subsystem, so I have to "share" files to them).

It is probably not the printer, but the fact that we switched to Suddenlink for Internet service and all of our laptops except for my two Linux laptops stopped working wirelessly with the printer.

Anyway, my wife is OK with physically connecting to the printer and I almost never need a hard copy.

Maybe you have some sort of (wireless) client isolation feature in your router turned on. Its sometimes called "AP Isolation".

I find that Windows machines wont "discover" my Canon printer like OSX+Bonjour does, so if the IP address changes you have to delete and reinstall it. :/ Might be OP's problem?

Have you installed the Windows bonjour client from Apple?

I was recently trying to print from Windows inside virtualbox on my Mac to a wireless Canon printer. After installing bonjour, Windows found and install the drivers for the Canon but when I "printed" to it only a blank page would come out. Sigh, so close.

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL999?locale=en_US ?

That would explain why the machine with iTunes works. Windows isn't my daily driver anymore but I'll definitely try that! Yeah Canon printers always seem to work after installing the monolithic Canon drivers, but tbh it just feels wrong.

Make a reservation for the printer in your DHCP - then itll never lose its IP and nothing else will ever take it.

Yeah that issue was when I was using the ISP-provided gateway combo. I'm running a PF box right now and it hasn't been reassigned in months. But yeah assigning a static ip would fix it. It's just annoying when its a family member who doesn't know that can be done.

Ah. I have gotten into the habit of giving my printers static IPs (still assigned via DHCP). That probably makes things more stable.

Same here, also, I never run the printer itself wirelessly, always wired, with a static IP. Rarely have issues... now printing over the internet to my home printer sometimes hiccups... whats worse is when friends print to you, and you've become their default, and suddenly you have a 150pg document printing from nowhere... that they didn't mean to send to you.

Printers supporting the good ol' JetDirect protocol, where you simply fling bytes @ port 9100, almost always work easy-peasy. It can't get easier than Postscript or PCL printers, where you can print by cat file.ps | nc -w 1 192.168.0.100 9100. It's pretty hard to screw that up.

Printers using that INSANELY over complicated Web Services for Devices (WSD) seem to have a huge footprint on Windows PCs, are resource intensive, require extra running services on the PC, seem to have a hard time with multiple instances of the printer on the same network, etc.

FWIW, you can screw it up pretty easily when you don't own your own router (it comes from your ISP), and it has some sort of subnet isolation thing going on.

This workflow always made more sense to me. Until they figure out a way to wirelessly deliver the printed page from the printer to my hand, I'm going to have to haul my ass over to the printer anyway.

Maybe a printer that can fold and launch paper airplanes....

The printing takes time. Might as well let it do that while you're walking, rather than waste time doing it all sequentially.

So true. Printing, copying technology seems so out of date and stone age like compared to other consumer electronics. Why cant I jsut print something off my iphone on any generic printer ? Why do printers come up with so much junkware ? Why are the prices of ink so damn expensive ?

I think Apple, MS or someone else must come up with a good printer and kill rest of the printer industry.

Printers are crap because most people don't need to print much, so most printers that are sold are basically the equivalent of the shaving stick that's sold only to enable the sales of replacement razor blades (ink cartridges).

Ink is expensive because again: Most people don't print much, and most people have printers that that have some very specific ink cartridge and will blindly buy the manufacturer brand ink because it's easier that way.

If you print much, pay for a reasonable laser printer, and your experience and cost per page are both much better.

> I think Apple, MS or someone else must come up with a good printer and kill rest of the printer industry.

They did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter

Everything since then has been garbage.

I've found that the only way to get network printing to work reliably is to buy a generic postscript printer and use an old linux machine (perhaps a raspberry pi) as a dedicated print server. I used to recommend that people buy enterprise gear, but lately I've had mixed results even with those - the printer in my office needs to be rebooted daily. Whatever you do, stay far away from consumer-grade networked printers. Half the time they won't even implement CUPS/IPP or LPD, they tunnel USB over ethernet and use the same shitty USB drivers that an intern wrote in 1997. Best to avoid printers altogether, really.

This. All my problems went away when I bought a Brother laser printer, and connected my Raspberry Pi to it running CUPS. No issues with discovery on Mac/Windows/Linux.

My solution has been DDWRT on my router, acting as a print server with the printer plugged into it. It has worked great, and never have issues like I did before when the printer was plugged into the computer. It always just works.

I also have a CS degree and gave up wireless printing in favor of USB printing at home. Wireless printing proved unreliable over many attempts. USB printing works reliably every time. We have to walk to over the printer anyway to get the printed documents out. Taking the laptop with us is hardly much more effort.

I try get my family members to use USB printer over wireless when possible as well. Wireless printing is more prone to failure, as chan happen when a wireless device changes IP, SSID or password.

I'm glad it's not just me! I've tried so often! I've moved to just-postscript emulation, and then every multicast-dns trick I can think of. I generally blame cups.

He said it worked for him on his two Linux laptops.

Welcome to the world of Google. Everything is a web service regardless of how practical that is.

Oh your ISP has an outage and you want to print? Well sorry the printer 3 feet from you is a brick until you can send your document to google again.

Who the fuck ever thought that was an acceptable design?

Nobody, considering every printer which supports cloud printing also supports Wifi printing and USB printing.

But ChromeOS does not support WiFi or USB printing.

It is not true. See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565007

Nobody except the company that a) came up with the stupid idea and b) implemented it as the sole printing option in their OS?

> Who the fuck ever thought that was an acceptable design?

Well, Google. :P

Well, to be fair, they do mention 'cloud' in the name. What else would one expect off of a cloud feature?

My complaint isn't that they 'misled' people into thinking their printing solution is better than it is.

My complaint is that they force people to use it because they support no other printing system.

There is API now for printers [1]. There is HP driver for example, that probably uses that [2]. And it seems that someone made up driver for Brother AIOs.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/apps/printerProvider

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hp-print-for-chrom...

[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wifi-printer-drive...

I've tried to stay the hell away from printers (and their myriad issues) for about a decade, and I feel that my life is better for it. I use the printer at work for the 6 pages per year I need printed.

I understand this situation might (will?) change, since I'm a single young childless guy.

Finally changed for us a few months ago after about 8 years of being happily printer-free. One too many trips to FedEx to print 2 pages of something, can't even remember what it was - probably a Groupon for a cash-only store that would only accept it in print. Also I really wanted a sheet-feed scanner so I can electronically archive the stacks of paper piling up around the house. We got an HP OfficeJet Pro 8625 and have been pretty happy with it on Linux, Windows 10 and Mac.

> a sheet-feed scanner so I can electronically archive the stacks of paper

That's the most 1995 thing I've read all year.

What with all the smartphone apps which will provide you with PDFs of the casually snapped pics of whatever paper pieces you feel like shooting.

(In the unlikely case the gummint doesn't already have all the info you may need, and you can't just ask for a copy. Which is mostly the case nowadays.)

> That's the most 1995 thing I've read all year.

Lol true :) the main reason is when I have a big stack of paper that I want to trash but I'm not sure if any of it will be relevant down the road. It's a pain to go through each page and snap a picture, with a sheet feed scanner I just set it on there and push a button. The most relevant example I can think of is hospital bills - we had a baby last year and my wife was also in the hospital for an unrelated surgery for a few days, and all of the bills come on paper mail. It's nice to trash the paper and still have the record.

What smartphone app will produce an archival quality scan with searchable OCR'd text from a casually snapped photo of a piece of paper?

Or better yet, of a stack of paper. If you can find me that I'll gladly pay for it. Well, at least up to the around half the cost of the sheet-feed scanner/printer.

At college printing was the norm- there are a lot of assorted articles assigned as readings, they are PDFs generated by a student worker and a copy machine, and reading them on a screen borders on physically painful because you can't reflow the text. Just printing out hundreds of pages really was the best option so far as I could tell.

To be fair, printing is hard on pretty much every device :(

Never had issues after just adding the printer's IP (and PSD driver) to CUPS.

It really isn't.

It doesn't work well.

USB flash drives work well. Charging cables work well. HDMI sometimes works well. WiFi (nowadays) sometimes works well. Chromecast sometimes works well.

Printing is (at best) in the "sometimes works well" basket.

Printing, like Wifi is entirely dependent on the devices you buy.

Buy a decent print server and a decent wifi AP (or a decent device that does both).

When I had a real job, HP were the print server to beat for us (a ~30 campus state-wide educational department). Now (in a home-office setup) I use an Airport Express with a Canon inkjet.

Maybe your experience is with Windows based network printing without a corporate network? I'm sure that probably sucks donkey balls, but honestly that's just another issue with the tools you choose. Choose a shitty print server or a shitty OS and you can expect to get shit.

Get a printer that supports Google Cloud Print. It's awesome! It ties a Networked printer that supports it to a Google account and then you can print from anywhere as long as you're signed into your Google account in Chrome. You can even share the printer with others!

Google Cloud Print : https://www.google.com/cloudprint/

>> "Chrome books are the best college laptops for the vast majority of students."

How are they better than Windows or Mac laptops which don't have issues you've mentioned (printing/lack of MS Office)? They may be 'good enough' for a lot of students but they are certainly not the best.

Harder to mess them up via software, backup to the cloud by default, and they are more secure.

Windows and Mac both have printer issues all the time. Just look at the Windows10 forums if you really don't believe it...

They are good until you need to run real software, like your prof's favorite little simulation software, written in Java, that happily works on Linux and Windows... but not ChromeOS.

Maybe I'm overestimating the potential success, but it staggers me that Google only released their Pixel laptops with ChromeOS. I would absolutely buy it if it had Ubuntu pre-installed on it with working drivers (and I think a ton of developers would finally have a legitimate competitor to a MacBook Pro).

I don't think Google is really interested in providing that, though. I doubt they make a lot of money on the hardware - it's all about the software, mindshare for ChromeOS.

I also think you overestimate how popular a machine like that would be. Dell offers Ubuntu laptops and they certainly haven't taken over the planet.

They also do goofy shit like ship a touchpad with a driver that can't be merged upstream because it would have to remove a chunk of the standard driver. Like how the fuck would that work?

Don't get me started on the wifi but that's hit or miss.

I've never seen an advertisement for a Dell computer running Ubuntu though. I've seen a ton of ads for the chromebook.

If google ran an ad campaign for chromebooks running Ubuntu I think it could easily compete with chrome os.

What do they get from that?

I don't think they want to compete with chromeOS, I think they want to sell chromeOS.

The only person who would benefit from that is you which is why people buy them and install ubuntu.

I use a chrome book for my daily driver. I used to want a ubuntu machine with chrome but after a little effort and getting a setup of crouton that works for me, I actually just want a browser with a shell. Which part is primary and which is secondary is really semantics when I get to working. I do everything in the browser or the shell with the exception of password safe which is an android app run inside the browser. I'd also like the android kindle app but that is blocked form working for some reason (I believe on amazon's side).

I think you're overestimating the potential success.

The vast majority of developers who want to run Ubuntu are more than capable of installing it on their own.

See also, the success (or lack thereof) of the Dell XPS Developer Edition.

Considering the fact that you can't even buy the developer edition outside US (or so Dell EMEA says), it looks like Dell is sabotaging it itself.

The list of countries where you can get it seems quite extensive:

https://bartongeorge.net/2016/03/31/live-in-europe-next-gen-...

Both Dell Germany and Austria said that they cannot deliver them (last month).

I do admit I did not try UK since they usually refuse to send things overseas to the continent.

Can you not? The UK website seems to have it for sale.

And the machines aren't really competitive against Thinkpads. They are still the standard Linux laptop for everyone I know.

The purpose of Pixel is to be a "top of the line" product for their operating system.

Wishing it had a different OS is sort of missing the point of why it exists in the first place.

The annoyance comes from the hardware being slicker than the software.

https://galliumos.org comes pretty close to this. I had all the hardware working on my Pixel in little more than the time it took to install.

You are a rounding error. There's not a large enough market. Also, consider how you are comparing a $2000 laptop to a Chromebook. What's the market again?

What about something like this: https://www.entroware.com/store/apollo ?

I agree with kris-s.

I want:

* USB Type-C

* A great screen

* A good keyboard

* Great CPU

* OK storage (or ability to dismantle and put my own SSD in)

* Touch screen

I essentially want a MacBook Pro with touchscreen and Linux. I know this... but I'm a really heavy Google user and if I'm not exclusively in Chrome then I'm dev'ing in a debian (with i3wm) I do not want OSX at all.

I could just get a Macbook Pro and blow away the OS, but no.

The Pixel looks perfect, except as a dev machine I'm unconvinced that spending the money just to discover later that it's going to not work for whatever reason is a good idea.

It's not that hard to install Linux on a Macbook Pro these days. Still no touch screen though.

The MBP doesn't have USB C either. The MacBook does, but then you lose the CPU, storage, keyboard, and still haven't got a touchscreen.

why don't you pick up a c720 or whatever for $100 and mess around with it as far as using a chroot. IT actually works pretty well and you can either run debian chroot and i3 in the second vty or just a cli debian that you can ssh to if most of your tools are CLI.

I do this, am on it right now, except I don't chroot. Just wiped out ChromeOS entirely because it's pretty nasty and installed Linux on SeaBios. I even bought a second one since it worked so well.

look at the hp spectre x360... no usb type-c though (but do you really need that?)

Do they have a decent amount of storage, I thought they were very cloud oriented.

My Ubuntu laptop could do with more storage, but I can't really justify the next size SSD jump.

I know a lot of the Chromebooks allow swapping out the mSata pretty easily. I've done it with my C720, swapped in a 128gb. I know the new Pixel is more locked down than the last, but haven't looked into it enough to say.

Developers still use a ton of commercial software. As an app developer, I'm still using things like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Office, etc. So until those come to Linux (or the open source alternatives gather enough traction that designers and such use them too), I don't think a Pixel laptop running Ubuntu would be enough.

I don't know if they fixed it with the later versions, but the first Chromebook Pixel has a nasty issue where the "don't check for google's signature on boot" flag can unset itself if your battery drains.

Real pain in the ass. Keep backups...

Since MS office runs on Android, could this indirectly bring Office to desktop Linux?

I use the web versions of Office 365 on my Chromebook, and that is sufficient for my occasional needs to work with Word or Excel files.

Indeed. And also big platform games-- consider Hearthstone (Blizzard), etc.

You'll have to expand on the etc., Hearthstone is the only "professional-grade" game that I can name on Android (and even that lagged months behind the iOS version, which lagged months behind the PC client). I keep waiting for gaming to take off on Android, but it's just so inundated with P2W garbage (cue heated discussion over Hearthstone's own P2W status).

  Borderlands
  Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
  Super Mega Baseball: Extra Innings
  Valiant Hearts : The Great War
  SoulCalibur
  Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
  DOOM 3 BFG Edition
  FINAL FANTASY IX
  Half Life 2: Episode 1
  Half Life 2: Episode 2
  The Talos Principle
  Broken Age
  Portal
  Goat Simulator

I could go on, but if Hearthstone is the only "professional-grade" game that you can name on Android then you clearly haven't even bothered to look.

Borderlands definitely isn't on the Play store, unless you're talking about Tales from the Borderlands, which is something entirely different.

Portal and the Talos Principle do seem to be on there, but only for specific Nvidia chipsets.

And calling Hearthstone "professional-grade" is a pretty big stretch as well.

Correct. Borderlands 2 is a coming soon title.

I play Borderlands 2 right now on my Nvidia Android TV. Looks about as good as the xbox 360.

Goat simulator is far from professional grade (on purpose).

World of Tanks Blitz (7 on 7 tank battles) is really good.

It's not P2W, but there is a "Pay 2 have an marginal edge" factor (you can buy better components and ammo with in-game money, and you don't earn enough in-game money through regular play to use all the better ammo all the time).

The devs are pretty good about maintaining a good in-game economy - they actually just upped the amount of in-game you earn in response to some new features that were costing to much.

> It's not P2W, but there is a "Pay 2 have an marginal edge" factor

That IS what P2W means.

I don't really play games on Android, so that's the main one I can think of.

But consider all of the great games that are ported natively to Android. Several Final Fantasy games, Chrono Trigger (my personal favorite). If the keyboard mapping is solid, that could be a really big deal. I know I'm in opinion territory here, but I'm pretty excited. Your question is fair though.

Minecraft?

Last time I checked (which was a while ago, mind), mobile Minecraft was so limited in its capabilities that I couldn't bear to play it after putting so many hundreds of hours into the actual version. Have they unified them yet?

You can run the full desktop version of Minecraft on Android using Boardwalk: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.zhuoweizha...

It is still fairly limited though they are constantly adding more features.

I believe redstone for example is now available in the Pocket/Console editions.

The third party ecosystem is not well developed yet, and Mojang doesn't seem to be caring. Hypixel (perhaps the largest multiplayer server) started and shut down a massive (thousands of simultaneous players) PE server b/c it just isn't there yet.

How complete is the Android port?

I have a better idea, how about we just kill ChromeOS and call it an Android device.

Why? ChromeOS is so much better. This is coming from an ardent Android user. Just curious why you would want to see Android instead?

ChromeOS has potential to become a productive platform. I don't really see Android ever becoming that. They are two different beasts.

Nothing about the ecosystem attracts me. What is the value proposition again?

Simple, elegant, fast, secure, and cheap laptop.

Completely hogtied and forced to use nothing but "apps" running in chrome?

Many people use browsers for the vast majority of their computing tasks (email, facebook, word processing, etc). Chrome handles this easily without the burden of general OS maintenance.

You mean like your iPhone which is "hogtied" to "apps" only running in iOS?

An iPhone is not billed as a replacement for a laptop (which ChromeOS devices most definitely are). Also, they can run the vast majority of web apps in addition to native iOS apps.

iPhone development shares first party language support (albeit with some different frameworks) with a major desktop OS, and has third party support for a number of other languages.

I think most people buying it know that it is not a full OS like Windows or Linux but sure my experience is with developers mostly.

Personally, I use my Chromebook for everything but serious dev work and photos & video work. Some of the things that I could not do on my phone/iPad that I use my Chromebook for are serious research, taking notes, watching movies in bed, using Google's Spreadsheets, minor dev via ssh and vim, and loaning it to guests and friends without a worry.

And replace one of the most secure operating systems with one of the most insecure... :(

Are Android apps running on Chrome OS actually going to be more secure, or does the platform inherently require things that are hard to secure?

(And, conversely, if it doesn't require that, what prevents Google from adding CrOS-style isolation to Android?)

Android already has superior isolation to Chrome OS. The permission system is much more broad and flexible than that offered by browsers and in 6.0 it gives even more direct control.

That's what I'd like to know, too. Is ChromeOS + Android still much more secure than just Android?

A second question would be: what is the performance penalty for running Android apps that already reside in an VM on top of Chrome OS? Is it 2%? 10%? 25%? It is more like running Bluestacks on Windows or like running Android natively on the hardware? I hope Google answers these questions at I/O or whenever it announces this merger.

If they did it "right" there'll be no performance penalty. It should be executing the apps the same way Android does. I imagine they've ported the runtime to Chrome OS.

Android always has a performance penalty because software runs in a JVM....

We're talking about the performance penalty compared to normal Android. Baseline performance penalties (compared to ...?) are present in both environments.

Besides, the JVM is a very good optimizer, and a good choice for certain types of high-performance tasks, especially since it can continually re-optimize the program as needed. It beats C in one of the anecdata on the Benchmarks Game, and is competitive in a few others:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/java.html

What "beats C" is a "custom counted hash set".

There is no JVM in Android. Android uses the ART runtime that compiles apps to native ARM, x86, MIPS, etc code.

AFAIK Android Runtime for Chrome is running on NaCl meaning it's properly isolated.

Right, if you can do that, why not stick NaCl + Android Runtime for Chrome on everyone's cell phone? NaCl is designed to be very low-overhead, and low-end Chromebooks are probably as underpowered as low-end phones.

NaCl is a very good isolation layer, but it's certainly possible that to make Android apps work / interoperate the way you'd expect (e.g., one app can broadcast an intent that another app can receive), you have to open up holes that are too big to secure. It's sort of like how the CPU-level distinction between kernel-mode and user-mode code is a very good isolation layer, but when you run actual operating systems that need their processes to communicate, it gets much harder to secure.

I personally imagine that when all that hype came out recently about merging chrome and android, that's what they're trying to do. Security of chrome and usability of android would be perfect, and hopefully also allow underlying OS pushes independent of manufacturer or carrier.

And yet the number of CVE's raised against Android is far below that of iOS or Windows.

This isn't a good metric unfortunately. A much more realistic metric is % of devices with unpatched CVEs. With iOS updates and Windows updates, most devices get their vulnerabilities patched (assuming the vendor addresses it at all), unless specific action is taken not to update them. However, most android devices are not updated past a few minor Android versions, and once the carrier no longer provides patches, there is often no way for a normal user to patch the OS at all.

So Windows could theoretically have 100x the number of vulnerabilities over time, but if they are fixed and autopatched, then those systems can still be more secure than a system that doesn't get patches past the first year.

This seems irrelevant because if ChromeOS machines became Android ones, Google would still control the updates and so they be like Nexus devices and would always get updates.

Nexus devices are getting updates for just around 2 years. All the older devices (including my dear Galaxy Nexus) are left behind. Imagine if your newly bought windows 10 PC would get security updates for only 2 years

The fact that you're being downvoted just shows how many Apple zealots unwilling to accept Apple recent (last few years) across-the-board failings in software security there are still here at HN.

Your reply is factually correct and rather than attempt to rebut it in any way, they just downvote you.

A quick search indeed seems to agree with the statement the number of CVE's raised against Android is below that of iOS.

Numbers from cvedetails.com: Android 245, iOS 857

I guess it is not a direct proof something is more insecure? There are other factors that push the numbers up or down. Project popularity, the type of CVE,...

And projects depend on each-other too (Linux kernel -> Chrome OS and Android).

Am I missing anything? Can any of the downvoters please elaborate?

How did you determine this?

Comparing the list at CVEDetails.com [1] [2] would seem to support this at first blush, but this is because the iOS list contains Safari and WebKit vulnerabilities, while the Android one does not include Chrome, Blink, or WebBrowser/WebKit vulnerabilities.

If you include Chrome [3] they look to be about even.

[1] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/19997/Google-Android.html?...

[2] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15556/Apple-Iphone-Os.html...

[3] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...

Okay, do it the other way around then. Or, at least make the two compliment each other, like iOS and OSX.

As it is, the two products seem like they are competing for resources at Google. Maybe that's because they are, I don't know. But from a consumer perspective it is a wasted opportunity.

For those wishing to experiment with the developer tools, here are instructions for installing the android runtime for chrome (ART):

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/getstarted_arc

This developer tool does not use the play store. One needs to download the app's APK file in order to install using the ART as described above.

I want to recommend Chromebooks to people or buy them for family members, but the 4 years of support is way too short. I think it should 6 or 7. If Google is serious about competing against Windows on the desktop, then it needs to do that. I don't care what their excuses are for not pushing it longer than 4 years. It needs to happen. Period.

I also hope that Google re-focuses its efforts on pushing more ARM-based Chromebooks into the market. The latest chips are significantly more powerful than Intel's Atom based chips, and the most high-end ones are very close or equal to Core M, for 1/10 of the price (I wish I was exaggerating).

Microsoft failed in helping ARM compete against Intel, because Windows still depends too much on x86. Chrome OS doesn't. It's architecture agnostic, and it's time to act like it. Yet, like 95% of the Chromebooks on the market are Intel-based, more than even Windows-based PCs (where there is a higher percentage of AMD-based machines). That's unacceptable to me, and I will boycott Chromebooks until that changes as well.

If you want an ARM laptop, buy one. The reason most people don't is that that they're slow -- the most popular Chromebooks aren't running Atom or Core M, they're running faster processors.

> If you want an ARM laptop, buy one.

You mean the one? Because there are only like 1 or 2 in the market. And their chips are like from 2013. That's why they are "slower". I want Snapdragon 820, or Exynos 8890, or a Cortex-A72-based one like Huawei Kirin 955 or Mediatek's Helio x30. And I want them this year, not in 2018. I don't want a dual core Cortex A15, or a quad-core Cortex A9, like what you get on the market right now.

If you look at Amazon like 8 out of 10 top Chromebooks have Atom Bay Trail "Celeron" chips. I don't know where you got the idea that there are "more popular ones" with Core i3 or higher. Were you thinking of Chromebook Pixel? That may be known by many but it's certainly not popular in sales.

There have been a few attempts to sell ARM-based laptops, including Smartbooks (1) and the Microsoft Surface. They've all flopped horribly. This doesn't mean they can never be successful, but it does make PC manufacturers less likely to take the risk again.

Of course, users can always buy an ARM tablet and add a cheap keyboard/case combo.

They needn't necessarily be slow -- see the Apple iPad Pro, for example. However, most buyers are probably looking for something that costs less than a Windows 10 laptop, and you can now get Windows laptops or 2-in-1s for $199 or less. These also have almost-instant on and can run sandboxed smartphone-style apps, albeit only a few hundred thousand of them.

In sum, it could be tough to launch an ARM-format laptop (much more expensive than launching yet another Windows 10 laptop), and the margins would most likely be thin or negative.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartbook

I'm aware of the shortcomings of the ARM-based Windows notebooks. But they mostly failed because there are no great "universal" apps.

Chromebooks have no such issue, because for one they are "browser-based" so ISA-agnostic, and two, Android apps are also ISA-agnostic for the most part. In fact the majority of native apps were optimized for ARM, not x86, last I checked, so if anything it's Intel's hardware that could cause some issues with some apps on Play Store-enabled Chromebooks.

As for performance, Apple's A9X can beat Core M on many workloads. A9X is probably no more than $35. That Core M was $280 (that's what the OEMs pay when they bundle them in their devices, possibly with some light negotiation).

http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/221881-apples-a9x-goes-hea...

> I'm aware of the shortcomings of the ARM-based Windows notebooks. But they mostly failed because there are no great "universal" apps.

Smartbooks were not Windows notebooks. They still failed. Why the Surface RT failed is another matter, but the major reasons included (a) price and (b) the inability to run traditional Windows 32 software.

> That Core M was $280 (that's what the OEMs pay when they bundle them in their devices, possibly with some light negotiation).

Hard to know what OEMs pay for Intel chips, and unless you work for one, you probably don't. (Even if you do work for one, you probably don't.) However, it's not going to be $280 on a $599 selling price.

In fact, Intel listed the Core M with a "Recommended Customer Price" of $281. Selling them by the thousand to OEMs, I'd guess it might get half that, though I'd be interested in hard evidence to the contrary.

Looking on amazon.com, most Core M laptops seem to be heavily discounted, possibly because they don't seem to offer particularly good performance for the money. The Lenovo Core M Yoga that hit the UK market first (at the end of 2014) roughly halved in price within months....

Actually they aren't only browser based. You can run native code:

Behold:

https://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/introduction-to-...

It's an amazing & beautiful feat of engineering. I'm unclear about it's feature - I suspect webassembly may become a standards-based equivalent that makes NaCL and PNaCL unnecessary.

As of Chrome 51, the original cr-48 is still getting updates.

|I don't care what their excuses are for not pushing it longer than 4 years. It needs to happen. Period.

Okay. How about five years as a minimum? https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

For what it's worth, even the CR-48 is still receiving updates, almost six years after launch: https://cros-omahaproxy.appspot.com

Aren't most of the apps on the Chrome OS and Google Play Store just adware ridden nastiness? I never seem to get what I want from there without having to hand over all my personal data.

Yeah, this just about describes 90% of mobile apps.

Every time I install a new game I have to go through the process of blocking every way it tries to pry in. Fortunately XPrivacy does a pretty good job of it. But without something like it, you're submitting by default to about a half dozen crash handlers, mobile app statistics tools, ad networks and more for every app you launch. You might think I'm exaggerating, but try using XPrivacy and you'll see - it's really that bad.

Isn't that just Sturgeon's law?

fyi (I didn't know either)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Sturgeon's revelation, commonly referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap".

One could also say the same about Windows - an ecosystem filled with nothing but virus and malware infected apps.

IMO the difference is: With Windows, it's expected that your installing from 3rd parties, so you get what you choose to get, warts and all.

Installing from the Play Store is supposed to be a "curated" experience. But most of the curated apps are shit.

I don't think you can say that about Windows.

Can you point to some "virus and malware infected apps" that Windows users commonly install?

> Can you point to some "virus and malware infected apps" that Windows users commonly install?

Try googling for driver or registry fix or keygen.

Enjoy.

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