> 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?
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.
"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".
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.
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.
"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
Your comment highlights one potential downside, ie. people not trusting the company because it looks confused on the outside.
But their app delivery platform is the Google Play infrastructure, which packages Android apps.