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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Okay, so if ChromeOS can run Android apps, and Android can run Chrome Web Apps[1], at what point does Google start to actually merge the platforms together?

1) http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/28/google-brings-chrome-apps-t...

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When they did those things, they already started merging the platforms.

Not really. There's still a separate Chrome Web Store and Google Play stores for apps. Google has to approve specific Android apps for Chrome, and you have to package your Chrome Web Apps apps using Cordova and put them through the same Google Play submission procedure every other Android app goes through to get them onto Android. There's no integration, there's just Chrome on Android and Android on Chrome.

parent didn't write "they already finished merging the platforms"

Right now this is a very Parallels sort of solution, where you run the app in a VM. No actual merging of anything is going on, there's just a runtime that lets you run Android apps on ChromeOS, looking like they do on Android.

I think it's likely that they're writing a runtime for dalvik to run on chromeOS, which, is essentially 'merging' though now you're just arguing semantics.

(Dalvik is dead. You probably mean ART.)

Dalvik the runtime is dead. Dalvik the bytecode is not.

Aren't Android apps run in a virtual machine (because of the Java roots) anyway?

(Genuine question, not me being a smarty pants.)

"Virtual Machine" is an overloaded term. It can either mean virtualization of an existing CPU (like the x86), or of an abstract bytecode machine (like the JVM or Dalvik). In the former case, you have to efficiently virtualize/emulate an entire system (including stuff like hardware devices and CPU interrupts); in the latter, you only have to execute the bytecode program well, which most VMs of this sort compile just-in-time (they compile the bytecode program into a native equivalent at execution time).

So far Cordova apps on Android have constantly been the worst apps on the platform. If Google wants to make it possible to make html mobile app that perform as well as native ones, there is an enormous gap to bridge.

I don't think it is as big as it once was with frameworks such as Polymer and Ionic.

I have heard many claims through the years that html based mobile apps were finally coming along. So far, I have not seen a single webapp that comes even close to native.

OK, so Linux can run Windows apps (Wine) and Windows can run Linux apps (Cygwin). When do Microsoft and RedHat merge their platforms?

Your thing, doesn't relate to his thing. Not one bit.

If Microsoft created and maintained both Linux and Microsoft, your analogy would make more sense.

I know that the behavior of the Chrome and Android teams hasn't always SEEMED like they were part of the same company, but they are. Microsoft and Red Hat are two different, competing organizations. If Android and ChromeOS are two different, competing organizations (and at one point, that really did seem to be the case), that's a problem for Google.

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