This is a mistake. Not only does it potentially irreparably destroy ChromeOS' strong security model, by trying to force two different platforms into one, but this is going to be a S L O W process to bring Android apps on ChromeOS, making the whole idea almost useless. If you thought Android finally getting "tablet apps" was slow, this will be much worse. Just look at them here announcing a whopping number of four apps. That has got to be the weakest "platform" launch in recent years. Even for Honeycomb they had like 30 apps at launch.
What Google should be doing (despite the strong internal conflict against this - Android is run by the guy who invented ChromeOS after all) is fitting Android on PC's.
Now hear me out. I don't want the current Android to be put on PC's. That's obviously a bad idea, and it's been tried before and it doesn't work. Why? Because it's a terrible user experience having a phone (or even tablet) UI on a laptop. Nobody really wants to use Android-x86 project on their laptops, either.
But here's what Google can do. It can turn it into another "Android Wear" or "Android TV", but for PC's. What that means is that it takes the Android core, and all the Android compatibility, and then highly optimizes it for that usage mode.
Doing this will be surprisingly easy for Google, and about an order of magnitude easier than putting Android apps on ChromeOS. What they need is 3 things:
1) a taskbar - don't laugh. It worked for ChromeOS. ChromeOS really started being seen as a potentially good alternative for Windows when it got a taskbar, despite it having only shortcuts to web apps. But it helps greatly with usability
2) multi-windows - another thing that ChromeOS got later on. Initially it was kind of full-screen/multi-desktop, which wasn't that great of an experience.
3) Android apps that scale nicely to 13" screens or larger. This is actually already underway since they announced the whole material design stuff together with the Polymer library for web apps (which guess what - work on 13"+ PC's!) - so they have already "fixed" this problem for Android PCs, even if somewhat unintentionally. In fact, they are already doing that with these Android apps inside ChromeOS. Look at the picture they're using in the blog post. The app could look exactly the same way on an "Android PC". So why not do the same thing on Android, where those apps came from? This would have the advantage of getting virtually all the apps on Android PC's from day one of "Android PC" mode.
So the first two would solve the "OS optimization" problem, for larger screens, while the last one would solve the problem of the Android apps being optimized for larger screens. Again, this should be much easier than doing it on top of ChromeOS.
Do I expect Google to do this anytime soon? No it won't. Instead it will waste 2 years not doing this, while Apple puts iOS on a laptop, with advanced multi-tasking, a laptop that I expect to be much more successful than any Mac OS laptop, because it will be cheaper, and because an order of magnitude more people know iOS now, than Mac OS, so an iOS laptop has a much wider reach. After 2 years, they'll think "gee, maybe we should do that, too", but by then they will already be behind.
Android, with its 1 billion user base and still rapidly growing is also by far a bigger threat to Windows on the desktop than ChromeOS. People in many countries, especially emerging ones, are already familiar with Android, and have been using it as their "first OS". It's such a shame Google isn't going to take advantage of this, to push people to Android laptops. Oh well, they can't say I didn't try. Failing to bring Android on PCs will be on them.
I would agree with you until I discovered that these Android applications are running under Native Client. So this doesn't irreparably destroy ChromeOS's strong security model, for example. It also think it maintains the fundamental application model of ChromeOS.
This isn't a fundamental change to ChromeOS -- it's just a compatibility library. Maybe they should go all out and port WINE to ChromeOS next.
And yet, to be truly compatible with Android, they will have to poke holes in the sandbox to allows access to contacts, social data, etc. So while I have no problem believing that the sandbox will be equally resilient against buffer overflows, this is nevertheless modifying the security model in a very real sense.
Personally, permissions are the one area of Android that I'm not happy with, because permissions being all-or-nothing means that apps can twist my arm to give them access to things I'd rather they not have access to (e.g. contacts). Seeing ChromeOS adopt this security model would make it less appealing to me rather than more appealing, because it encourages apps to demand access to more data than they need.
You're right that Chrome OS doesn't store any of that at the moment. But this is the sort of integration that would be fairly easy for Google to add. Chrome already has some minimal integration with Google web services, especially on Android where Chrome will automatically log in to Google for you. How much bigger a step would it be to fetch your Google contacts while they're at it?
The concept of permissions (to contacts, etc) doesn't exist on Chrome OS and will likely never exist on Chrome OS. But both Chrome and Android apps can access the Internet where all this stuff is stored. But this has nothing to do with security of Chrome OS itself.
Sure, nothing stops a website (or app) from going to Google to ask for your contacts. This is the classic "invite your contacts" strategy that Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. have employed since the beginning. But granting that access is almost never mandatory with such services. Why? Because people just wouldn't sign up. It's not even necessarily a question of people not trusting the service, because the UX hurdle of forcing the user to enter yet-one-more-password is enough to hurt conversion rates.
On Android, this is not the case; if you use the Facebook or LinkedIn apps, you will be forced to give up access to your contacts (unless you root your device). The reasons for this are twofold. First, Android permissions are all-or-nothing, which means that apps have to over-approximate their required permissions. Second, because granting access is so easy (no UX hurdle to speak of), there's really no downside to doing so (which is to say, conversion rates will not decrease substantially).
The issue of how the device gets access to the data (e.g. whether contacts are cached locally or are purely remote) is really not the issue. You could easily implement the Android API with no local caching of data, and aside from the performance hit the behavior would be identical.
I could certainly imagine a version of ChromeOS which supports Android apps without the Android permission model, essentially by returning empty data sets whenever the app asks. This would be compatible with ChromeOS's current security policies, and would protect user privacy. But it would be so easy for Google to break that line in order to promote "better UX" for apps in the style of Android, that I can't honestly convince myself that they'll never go down that road. And that's why I can't be entirely comfortable with believing the ChromeOS security model will remain intact.
Android has potential to be next Windows, because it's getting commoditized right now. Thanks to cheap devices. Apple doesn't have that, because it doesn't want it.
I think there are few things remaining for Android to replace Windows (in no particular order):
1. UX - what you already said.
2. Cheap and universal docks for even cheapest devices. Alternatively cheap wireless display technology (without lags), something more than ChromeCast - again even for cheapest devices.
What can be used for this? Bluetooth (sound and input) and/or USB-OTG (with charging of device).
3. Android needs to be selfhosting - you can't rely on Windows or traditional desktop linux if you want to replace them. There is toybox and Aborginal Linux project from Rob Landley on http://landley.net/ Recent commits advancing in the goal of building Linux kernel with clang will come in handy too.
I think that all of these will eventually come, but ask myself is this what Google really wants now.
ChromeOS seems more in line with Google business model.
They are using NaCl to bring Android apps to ChromeOS, so probably it could enable Android apps for Windows. But that would undermine Android as replacement of Windows just like Wine for Desktop Linux.
Should be noted that Android as a PC OS already exists. Can read more about the x86 version here...
http://www.android-x86.org/
It's not supported by Google (no Play services AFAIK) but most applications that are installable from a 3rd party app store should run (they're JVM apps after all).
But why would you want to run Android on your PC? What advantages does it offer over Windows for the average user?
-- "Android, with its 1 billion user base and still rapidly growing is also by far a bigger threat to Windows on the desktop than ChromeOS. People in many countries, especially emerging ones, are already familiar with Android, and have been using it as their "first OS"."
Interesting point... I recently helped an elderly man (who has very poor reading skills and has never used a computer without help) - buy, set-up, and use his first computer. What did I choose for him?
A cheap Android tablet with a keyboard case. The idea behind this decision was that most people (in a low-income area) that he'd ask for help would already know how to work an Android tablet because they probably have a phone or tablet already. If not, he knows the basics, and it's much more simple than a PC but almost fully-capable with his needs (Facebook, PayPal, YouTube). I also locked it down so that he could get help with his financial data without giving anybody the actual password to his bank accounts (as he was doing before).
> Doing this will be surprisingly easy for Google, and about an order of magnitude easier than putting Android apps on ChromeOS.
I suspect that putting Android apps on ChromeOS isn't that hard now, given all the work that's gone into Native Client and that even if the beta of the Android Runtime being used wasn't announced until I/O this year, the end goal of doing this has probably been part of the motivation behind Native Client for some time.
In fact, the fact that its in Beta and they are starting to publicly expose it with high-visibility apps probably means that its mostly done. And its potentially a much bigger win than expanding Android to low-end PCs, since there's no reason when its completely ready to leave Beta it has to be limited to ChromeOS -- a Native Client based runtime for apps should be usable on Chrome desktop as well, which suddenly means "Android" apps can be used on Android (naturally), on ChromeOS, and on MacOS/Windows desktop.
Chrome is already the defacto desktop for millions of users regardless of actual base OS. They are leveraging Android apps to continue to chip away at the things that "don't work unless its a native" and dev effort already committed to mobile.
This way when your hardware cycle is up. Hmmm $300 machine runs chrome and all those cool apps I use on my mobile but for my "desktop".
The goal is to erase the idea of desktop all together for the most part.
If Google will bring Android apps to traditional desktops they can gain something in a short run, but hurt Android as a platform replacing Windows. Android as Windows replacement can bring Google much more, but it would take much more time.
Personally I hope that Android with or without Google will replace Windows.
What would be the advantage of Android to replace Windows on the Desktop?
As someone who doesn't use Android, i am really interested. Are there technical details where Android is ahead somehow or is it personal preference?
Before they can implement 3), they have to actually make ChromeOS scale nicely to high-res displays. I've got a Chromebook Pixel that usually runs at slightly below 1080p (closest possible with 3:2 ratio) despite having a max of 2560 x 1700, simply because the max res is unusable in Google's own OS without a massive amount of tweaking. UI does not scale, taskbar does not scale, have to manually bump up the font size within Chrome, etc. It's embarrassing.
And I say this as someone who really likes the Pixel otherwise.
I'm posting from a ChromeBook pixel running at 2560 x 1700, and the UI looks great. The taskbar, UI, fonts, etc. are all scaled perfectly.
Have you tried running at 2560 x 1700 on the most up-to-date version of ChromeOS? Some of the issues you had may have been fixed in more recent Chrome releases.
I'm posting from an Acer C720 docked to a 1920 x 1080 Benq monitor, and it looks and works just fine. If Open Office was working on ChromeOS, my joy would be extreme.
Which goes to my point - that it would be even easier to do 3) on Android, than it is to do it now on ChromeOS, since Android has nice resolution scaling.
You are living in the past, when Windows was the holy graal for the software companies. Today Android is waaaay outselling Windows. Its like advising Ford to change his cars in such ways as to allow clients to use horses, instead of motors. And yes there are markets for horse cars and laptops today, but those are not the markets where the big profits are.
What Google should be doing (despite the strong internal conflict against this - Android is run by the guy who invented ChromeOS after all) is fitting Android on PC's.
Now hear me out. I don't want the current Android to be put on PC's. That's obviously a bad idea, and it's been tried before and it doesn't work. Why? Because it's a terrible user experience having a phone (or even tablet) UI on a laptop. Nobody really wants to use Android-x86 project on their laptops, either.
But here's what Google can do. It can turn it into another "Android Wear" or "Android TV", but for PC's. What that means is that it takes the Android core, and all the Android compatibility, and then highly optimizes it for that usage mode.
Doing this will be surprisingly easy for Google, and about an order of magnitude easier than putting Android apps on ChromeOS. What they need is 3 things:
1) a taskbar - don't laugh. It worked for ChromeOS. ChromeOS really started being seen as a potentially good alternative for Windows when it got a taskbar, despite it having only shortcuts to web apps. But it helps greatly with usability
2) multi-windows - another thing that ChromeOS got later on. Initially it was kind of full-screen/multi-desktop, which wasn't that great of an experience.
3) Android apps that scale nicely to 13" screens or larger. This is actually already underway since they announced the whole material design stuff together with the Polymer library for web apps (which guess what - work on 13"+ PC's!) - so they have already "fixed" this problem for Android PCs, even if somewhat unintentionally. In fact, they are already doing that with these Android apps inside ChromeOS. Look at the picture they're using in the blog post. The app could look exactly the same way on an "Android PC". So why not do the same thing on Android, where those apps came from? This would have the advantage of getting virtually all the apps on Android PC's from day one of "Android PC" mode.
So the first two would solve the "OS optimization" problem, for larger screens, while the last one would solve the problem of the Android apps being optimized for larger screens. Again, this should be much easier than doing it on top of ChromeOS.
Do I expect Google to do this anytime soon? No it won't. Instead it will waste 2 years not doing this, while Apple puts iOS on a laptop, with advanced multi-tasking, a laptop that I expect to be much more successful than any Mac OS laptop, because it will be cheaper, and because an order of magnitude more people know iOS now, than Mac OS, so an iOS laptop has a much wider reach. After 2 years, they'll think "gee, maybe we should do that, too", but by then they will already be behind.
Android, with its 1 billion user base and still rapidly growing is also by far a bigger threat to Windows on the desktop than ChromeOS. People in many countries, especially emerging ones, are already familiar with Android, and have been using it as their "first OS". It's such a shame Google isn't going to take advantage of this, to push people to Android laptops. Oh well, they can't say I didn't try. Failing to bring Android on PCs will be on them.