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Comment by qhwudbebd | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't quite clear to me from the article: are the resulting Flutter apps running under the Android emulation layer or are they proper Chrome OS apps?

It's great that Chrome OS can run legacy Android stuff, but it'd be a shame if the ugly design of Android started to leak into Chrome OS proper in a way that makes it hard/impossible to deprecate.

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From the article:

> Because Chrome OS runs Android apps, targeting Android is the way to build Chrome OS apps.

The screenshot of "The Flutter ChromeOS lint rules in action" also appears to show an Android app manifest.

Which, honestly, seems like kind of a strange design to me. The whole point of Flutter is to be a cross-platform app framework; why not just add a ChromeOS backend to it instead of running the Android version inside an Android emulation layer?

Ah, that's a shame. I don't think I'd want to use something that pulled in messy Android as a dependency on Chrome OS.

They may create dedicated shell in future. Proper desktop support in flutter is in very early stages currently.

Dart did transpile to JS, so a WebAssembly backend for a 'web native' Flutter experience on Chrome OS is imaginable.

But their app delivery platform is the Google Play infrastructure, which packages Android apps.

Because this is Flutter/Dart team pushing their agenda, not the ChromeOS team embracing Flutter.

Just like the Android team, usually answers with a political correct "It is nice to have options" when asked about Flutter and Android. They were pretty clear at this year's IO that Android's future is now Kotlin, with Java takind a 2nd place and C++ a 3rd one.

It looks like you could be right. If this is true then publishing the following on the Google developer blog is downright deceptive:

"Because Chrome OS runs Android apps, targeting Android is the way to build Chrome OS apps."

Note that they're not saying it's a good way to build Chrome OS apps, they're saying it's "_the_ way to build Chrome OS apps".

I read it as an euphemism for workaround.

They do say "Flutter is a great way to build Chrome OS apps" and they say "Because Chrome OS runs Android apps, targeting Android is the way to build Chrome OS apps."

The article is about chromeos and flutter, to make it clearer, they could have said, "targeting Android is the way to build, Flutter, Chrome OS apps."

Targeting Android to create Flutter chromeos apps currently seems to be the go, this may change once flutter for the web and or the linux desktop support is fully baked.

Perhaps that is what they meant. Or maybe it isn't.

Right now, Google seems like a rudderless ship floating in a sea of possibilities created by a bunch of very talented kids suffering from ADHD.

I think someone at Google should grab the helm and actually do some steering.

I think the TL for Flutter is no spring chicken, he did an interesting post the other day, talks about what other languages they looked at when they decided to move on from Javascript.

"Flutter was started by engineers from the Chrome team, and myself (who worked in the open source team as editor of the HTML standard)." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19856079

I've always wondered how viable this was as a corporate strategy: why risk the entire company on one business when you could own several that may or may not succeed, each running (relatively) autonomously, etc...

Your comment highlights one potential downside, ie. people not trusting the company because it looks confused on the outside.

Looking confused is not the reason for the lack of trust. The reason is the threat of platforms or APIs getting shut down after you have invested a lot of time in them or built your own product on top of them.

It sounds like they are using the Android emulation:

> targeting Android is the way to build Chrome OS apps

I don't think this is "legacy" as far as the Chrome OS developers are concerned. Android emulation is newish and improving. Before that, Chrome apps were written in JavaScript using a similar API to Chrome extensions. (They used to run in any Chrome browser, but were deprecated except on Chrome OS.)

https://flutter.dev/web

It's a bit murky at the moment. It seems like they plan to do a full rewrite for the open web but right now they have the Android stack working in ChromeOS and that let's you start building flutter apps in a windowed, mouse and keyboard environment.

That's wrong, this is a Flutter app, built to run on Android, running in Chrome OS.

That's what I'm saying. You can do this Android loop now, (and work on windowed UX) but they do plan a full web stack later.

Since it's their own custom renderer, they just need to write a back-end for the web (which is what they are doing)

I feel like one of the selling points of chromeos was everything running in the browser so you don’t have to worry about security problems as much and adding android and Linux support seems to backtrack on that.

Yes, true, but the Linux support seems targeted at developers only, and Android is at least sandboxed better than traditional desktop apps. For someone just using the browser, it's much the same as before.

It looks like this is going to be an OS where all apps run in a sandbox of some sort. Nothing is really native, but there is a variety of sandboxes.

It appears to be running under the Android emulation layer:

> Because Chrome OS runs Android apps, targeting Android is the way to build Chrome OS apps.

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