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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

This has become enough of a problem that Google is working on decoupling the "system" version of Chrome (used for login window, settings, etc) from the browser that users interact with directly on Chrome OS, making it so you can keep using the device safely after its EOL date (which is 6 or 8 years now I think).

Here[0] is a little documentation about it, but if you want to use the decoupled browser, it looks like you can enable it via chrome://flags if you are on a recent version (which OP's mom isn't, and since her device isn't going to get patched I doubt she'll benefit from this).

0: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/he...

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Reminds me of how we bought a Chromebook in 2016, and specifically got a version that was "planned" to be allowed to run Android apps (which was a new thing at the time).

Fast forward to 2022, and the ASUS C201 support for Android is still "planned" and unsupported. https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-suppo...

Feels like a big con just to get people to buy chromebooks in 2016 at this point.

Also, a reminder to not trust Google if they "plan" something like the upcoming Chrome "Lacros" decoupling

my acer chromebook from 2015 got support.

i dont think the fault is entirely with google here, asus shouldn't have marketed it as that, considering your chromebook had an arm processor - great for battery life, but google really only implemented the docker/shell and android support for intel cpus.

really unfortunate though

Ironically, most Android apps are built for arm processors.

I think the Chromebooks Android support is more like the virtual devices that Android studio creates then actual native installs.

It's been quiet long since I've last I checked it out, but at least at that time the locale was different inside the android apps vs chromeos (including keyboard layout etc) and there was a separate settings app like on any Android devices with dummy values in hardware etc.

It was funny because it let me install Firefox on the Chromebook but it felt more like gimmick then an actually useful feature as a lot of apps just outright didn't work

Most android apps are java. They should be built for jvms. The fact that we have java jars that fail because of hardware architecture invalidates java as an idea to me.

I don't think Android uses a JVM. Android apps are AOT compiled from DEX bytecode.

I have very little faith in their big picture.

This sounds like the same problem that manifested with Android and resulted in Treble.

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