Mossberg: Android apps on Chrome OS arrive, disappoint – Recode (Feb 16, 2017)
Google has officially released its Android-apps-on-Chrome beta and it’s getting fairly terrible reviews. While Google is legendary for attaching the beta label to things that feel like they’ve long outgrown it (see especially Gmail), in this case the label actually feels premature, since the experience on these new Chromebooks sounds much more like an alpha than a beta. The software is very buggy, and the implementation of Android apps on ChromeOS is if anything even worse than it long has been on Android tablets. Getting Android apps onto a laptop sounds really compelling – all the apps you’re used to on your phone, now on your PC! – but the reality for now sounds extremely disappointing. It’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a misstep by Google, which promised these launches a few months back but clearly isn’t ready to deliver on them yet. In fact, these devices appear to suffer from some of the same lack of readiness as the recent Android Wear 2.0 release, although that was supposedly a finished product. This is uncharacteristic for Google, and it’s a worrying sign that things are being rushed out of the door to meet deadlines rather than because they’re ready.
via Recode
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