Hacker News Reader

Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool from a technical perspective, but what's the use case? I can't think of a single Android app that I use that doesn't have an equivalent desktop/web app that's optimized for a mouse and keyboard. I can't imagine the UX nightmare of using touch-optimized apps on a regular PC.

View on HN

> I can't think of a single Android app that I use that doesn't have an equivalent desktop/web app that's optimized for a mouse and keyboard.

I can. E.g. my phone settings manager, my TV provider's remote app, my main screen of multiple widgets, my local TV station's weather app w/ notifications, etc. Also, in many cases for web apps w/ mobile app equivalents, the latter are easier to use and snappier. Finally, though less useful, this can give an app developer a sandbox in which to embed his app upon distribution and be able to target Android and Linux assuming the app is simple.

> I can't imagine the UX nightmare of using touch-optimized apps on a regular PC.

You'd be surprised. Android has full mouse and keyboard support - you can click on buttons, tab between text boxes, use scroll gestures... it's not perfect (and some apps are awful) but I've been very surprised by how much I can do.

Yeap. You can even alt-tab between apps (even if the UI is worse than on Windows).

If you can debug in this, it's got to feel a lot faster than the emulator. Though I admit I haven't used the emulator in so long that I don't know if they ever fixed how slow it was.

That's a great point; I hadn't even thought about development. If that is indeed the case, this could be a godsend for Android devs!

the emulators got faster about a year ago

https://infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/say-hello-to-a-faster-...

>Though I admit I haven't used the emulator in so long that I don't know

https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator.html

On my MacBook it's actually faster than the iOS simulator.

I'm not sure you need a use case for this to be a sensible addition to the tools we have in the box.

IMHO if this machine is linux, and that machine is linux, and both machines are fully open, then why can't you run this app on that machine? Because reasons, that's why... no more!

For example, app development - virtual machines running Android are dreadfully slow and cumbersome to use.

Also, Linux doesn't have many apps and small games. For example, if this works, Linux users can run Word and Excel, as well as Angry Birds.

In current state it will probably crash on more complex stuff.

In two years if there's no widespread adoption it will still crash because it's just another potential platform for QA to test on.

Also if I'm not mistaken it will only run apps that are compiled for x86 Android.

I can tell you haven't used the new emulator in some time. It's just as fast as the iOS simulator.

Nice way to try out suspicious looking apps in safe environment, before loading them up in your phone.

I've been interested in something like this since Spotify pulled all support for their cross-platform libspotify library and left us with just their iOS and android SDKs. Nothing I could see specifically mentions audio support but surely it's a given.

WhatsApp. I have several phone numbers, despite having just one phone - and I need separate WhatsApp accounts for each, but the official (essentially, only) client insists on only being connected to one.

> the official (essentially, only) client insists on only being connected to one.

You might be able to work around that limitation by using an app like AppCloner [1] or Parallel Space [2].

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.applisto.a...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lbe.parall...

+1 WhatsApp is the only reason I keep an Android phablet with data only plan which I would happily get rid of since I do everything on a laptop or small netbook when possible. I know about the WA web client, but it doesn't solve the problem as it requires the phablet to be on, connected and not in sleep mode which is a huge limitation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com