Android Nougat has an experimental "Freeform Window Mode" that I've been playing with. I can connect my LG V30 to a USB-C dock and have a windowed desktop-style environment with a mechanical keyboard, Bluetooth mouse, monitor, etc. Most of my phone's apps are comfortable running like this. Chrome actually displays the desktop versions of sites.

This Thursday, I signed up for coder.com (featured here on HN) and was able to write some Go code using VS Code in the browser. It was a pretty solid experience.

Performance was fine. I had my email and a podcast player going in the background and, honestly, I could probably do a lot of my day-to-day work with this and an EC2 box for running sites.

But it was glitchy, because Android hasn't really invested in this use case. The Taskbar home screen replacement would close the start menu as soon as it opened 90% of the time. There was a black space at the bottom of the screen which would change height almost randomly. Large windows conflicted with the notification bar and I'd end up opening my notifications when I wanted a new tag in Chrome. Right clicking maps to the back arrow in Chrome for some reason.

But the point is, between modern phone hardware and the cloud, we're not far from a performance perspective. We just have to decide that's where we want to go and commit to it.