Chromebook & Android - a Shrewd Move by Google

At Google's I/O 2016 Conference last week, one of the big announcements by Google was the support of apps from the Android Play Store on Chromebook devices running Chrome OS.

Today, Chromebooks fill a unique niche in computing.  They are based on a simple concept of the browser being the primary app for a laptop.  So the laptop themselves can be simpler requiring less CPU and RAM and therefore lower cost. You can often buy a quality Chromebook for $250.  First introduced in the fall of 2011, they have seen slow, steady sales growth over the last few years.

Since they are not designed to be a "general purpose" computer they don't need many of the additional capacity for storage, ports, etc and have excellent battery life (10 hrs or more).

While many enthusiasts do not consider them to be be real computers, for many use cases, Chromebooks makes a lot of sense.  This is especially true in the education space, where Chromebooks have been selling very well. Chromebooks are replacing Windows and even iPads in many schools.  In fact Chromebooks outsold Apple Macbooks in Q1 of 2016 in the US according to IDC.

One of the attributes that schools love is that Chromebooks are completely self maintained by Google from an OS/Browser standpoint.  They also boot very quickly, easily support multiple users and kids really can't screw them up.   

But I can also see a similar use case at home.   For many folks today, their primary use case is web browsing.  Whether it's Search or Facebook or whatever, many folks don't need a full OS anymore that are designed to run what I describe as traditional apps.  Think MS Office for example.  Chromebook users can use O365 via browser but can not install local editions of Word, Excel or PowerPoint.  But many of these users use Google Docs instead.

With that said, Google has seen through Android an explosion of apps, whether business, games, whatever.  You can argue that the Google Play store contains the largest and most diverse app library available today.  The problem was that none of these apps could run on a Chromebook.  

Quietly back in 2014 - Google announced the Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) and worked with a number of select partners to develop and test the ability to run Android Apps on a Chromebook.  But ARC required some porting work on the part of developers - so not an optimal approach.  In addition ARC ported apps could not pass Google's own Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS).

So Google decided the reboot the approach and borrowed a concept from Cloud Applications known as containers.  So similar to what Docker does, Android apps are containerized with the complete Android Framework including the hardware abstraction layer.  Now this allows the app to run in it's own isolated environment on ChromeOS.

The end result is that now all 1.5M apps in the google play store can run on a 2015 or newer version of a Chromebook.  Google has published a compatibility list.  But that does mean that older Chromebooks won't be able to support this new technology which is a little bit of a shame.  The cut off appears to mostly age-based on not CPU or RAM based.

There are some additional limitations in that apps right now can not scale but I expect that to change in coming versions

As I've posted about several times over the last few years, PC sales have been in decline, dropping back to around 250M units / year.  And while Apple has seen growth and holds a solid 4th place behind Lenovo, HP and Dell, the fact that Chromebooks sold more in the US shows it's acceptance.

Personally I think Google is smelling a little blood in the water with Windows. As we all know MS stumbled with Windows 8/8.1 and is now running as hard as they can with Windows 10 and it's OneCore approach and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps that support apps running on PCs, Tablet's Phones and Game Consoles.  But the reality is that many of the apps that folks use today are Mobile apps running on Android.

Android sells over 1B devices per year and many folks are very used to their apps and would actually like to see them on a larger format device.  So the ability to have a laptop or desktop that they can use both the Chrome browser and still run all of their android apps on is potentially a compelling story.  

Bottom line is that Google just made a shrewd move by opening up Chromebooks to support Android apps.  It will be interesting to see how this moves the needle in sales.  I don't expect Chromebooks to overtake traditional PCs anytime soon, but as more and more apps/services are available on-line via Cloud services, the need for full OS based PCs will continue to wane.








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