No one likes to be told what to do, so why should your Chromebook follow the rules? Well, it’ll have to abide but whatever physics dictates, but when it comes to running Android apps, there is a way to convince it (and other operating systems) to play ball, if you’re willing to do a little legwork. Well, fingerwork.
Image by Google
As the video above from Vlad Filippov explains, you’ll need to load some custom JavaScript to get things up and running. Everything you need can be found on Filippov’s GitHub and while it’s targeted at Chrome OS, there’s nothing stopping you from running Android programs on any platform that supports Google Chrome.
The magic is the Android App Runtime, which once installed, gives you the option to run almost any app.
There are some caveats — Filippov describes his achievement as a “proof-of-concept”, so expect to run into a few hiccups. It also seems you can only have four apps running, unless you’re willing to tinker further and that the hack itself overwrites Vine by default (an acceptable loss, I’m sure).
Still, it’s a neat trick and one I’m sure will be fun to play around with.
Running custom Android APKs on the Chromebook Pixel [YouTube, via Phandroid]
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