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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.

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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).

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