My Chromebook had an OS upgrade last night, and when it rebooted it tooks pains to tell me that I can now install Android apps on it. In fact, it went ahead and installed a couple for me. Great! I thought, I can run my favourite Android apps. Then I thought again. This morning I thought about it some more. Then I flipped the switch to disable it.
Don’t get me wrong. I really like Android. I have an Android phone and an Android tablet, and they’re terrific.
But the thing is this: all the apps I really need on the Chromebook are already there. And the only Android apps that I could possibly want would only duplicate Chrome apps I already have. For example I don’t need the Google+ Android app because I already have the Chrome app for that. The same goes for the Google productivity apps (Docs, Sheets. etc.), Netflix, Twitter, and so on.
And then there’s the screen-size question. Many Android apps are designed to run on small, portrait-layout screens as found on phones and tablets; I read that many just don’t scale well to a full-size (well, laptop-size, at least) landscape-layout screen.
So I switched it off. I really don’t need another Android platform, at least not right now. If it turns out that there’s an app I really need on the Chromebook, and there’s only an Android version of that app, I’ll take another look. But right now I just don’t have a use for it.
Pete Ford 