Bring Your Android App to Chromebooks

Bring Your Android App to Chromebooks

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Posted by Dylan Reid and Elijah Taylor, Software Engineers, Chrome OS



Users love Chromebooks for their speed, security and simplicity. According to IDC¹, in Q1 of this year Chromebook shipments overtook Macs in the U.S. That means, thanks to your support, in the U.S. Chrome OS is now the second most popular PC operating system.  As we continue to increase our focus on mobility, we want to make sure your apps are easily available on this new form factor, reaching the many Chrome devices while maintaining a great experience.

Today we announced that we’re adding Android apps to Chromebooks, which means users will be able to install the apps they know and love. Later this year you can expand your app’s reach to a new hardware platform and wider audience while maximizing the Google Play ecosystem. With expanded app availability, new use cases and improved workflows can be achieved for all Chromebook users, whether for personal use, for work or for education.  As a developer we encourage you to test your app as described here.

Developers can start to optimize their app for the Chromebook form factor in advance of launch later in 2016. Here are some of the benefits:

• Android Apps can be shown in 3 different window sizes to allow the best experience


• Users can multi-task with multiple Android apps in moveable windows along with a full desktop browser, all within the familiar Chrome OS interface.


• Keyboard, mouse, and touch input will seamlessly work together


• Users will get Android notifications on their Chromebooks


• Android apps benefit from the Wifi or Bluetooth connectivity setup by the user or the administrator


• File sharing is seamless between Chrome and Android apps through the Files app


• Performance of demanding apps such as games or design apps is excellent

In addition to being a great personal device, one of the reasons Chromebooks are popular in schools and businesses is that you can centrally manage and configure them with 200+ policies. Administrators can manage Android apps on Chromebooks using the same Admin Console. In addition to whitelisting or push installing specific apps to users, admins can selectively enable them for parts of their organization while disabling in others.



Please come to our Google I/O session on May 19th at 4 pm. You will hear directly  from our friendly engineers on how to optimize your Android app for Chromebooks. We are making the feature available in early June on Asus Chromebook Flip, Chromebook Pixel (2015) and Acer Chromebook R11 specifically for developers to have sufficient time to test their apps. For the actual launch and thereafter we will keep adding support for the following list of devices. Please see detailed instructions on how to get started with testing your apps.



1 - IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, May 2016

Chrome custom tabs smooth the transition between apps and the web

Chrome custom tabs smooth the transition between apps and the web

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Originally posted on the Chromium blog

Posted by Yusuf Ozuysal, Chief Tab Customizer

Android app developers face a difficult tradeoff when it comes to showing web content in their Android app. Opening links in the browser is familiar for users and easy to implement, but results in a heavy-weight transition between the app and the web. You can get more granular control by building a custom browsing experience on top of Android’s WebView, but at the cost of more technical complexity and an unfamiliar browsing experience for users. A new feature in the most recent version of Chrome called custom tabs addresses this tradeoff by allowing an app to customize how Chrome looks and feels, making the transition from app to web content fast and seamless.

Chrome custom tabs with pre-loading vs. Chrome and WebView

Chrome custom tabs allow an app to provide a fast, integrated, and familiar web experience for users. Custom tabs are optimized to load faster than WebViews and traditional methods of launching Chrome. As shown above, apps can pre-load pages in the background so they appear to load nearly instantly when the user navigates to them. Apps can also customize the look and feel of Chrome to match their app by changing the toolbar color, adjusting the transition animations, and even adding custom actions to the toolbar so users can perform app-specific actions directly from the custom tab.

Custom tabs benefit from Chrome’s advanced security features, including its multi-process architecture and robust permissions model. They use the same cookie jar as Chrome, allowing a familiar browsing experience while keeping users’ information safe. For example, if a user has signed in to a website in Chrome, they will also be signed in if they visit the same site in a custom tab. Other features that help users browse the web, like saved passwords, autofill, Tap to Search, and Sync, are also available in custom tabs.

Custom tabs are easy for developers to integrate into their app by tweaking a few parameters of their existing VIEW intents. Basic integrations require only a few extra lines of code, and a support library makes more complex integrations easy to accomplish, too. Since custom tabs is a feature of Chrome, it’s available on any version of Android where recent versions of Chrome are available.

Users will begin to experience custom tabs in the coming weeks in Feedly, The Guardian, Medium, Player.fm, Skyscanner, Stack Overflow, Tumblr, and Twitter, with more coming soon. To get started integrating custom tabs into your own application, check out the developer guide.