Google's Chrome and Android is taking a bigger step forward this week. Back in September, Google launched a limited App runtime (ARC) for Chrome and now the company is expanding its beta project to allow Android apps to run on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
This is an early experiment designed primarily for developers, but anyone can now download an APK of an existing Android app and launch it on a Windows / Linux PC, Mac, or Chromebook.
ARC is based on Android 4.4, meaning a lot of standalone apps are immediately compatible. Simply download the ARC Welder app and obtain APKs you want to donwload from Google’s Play Store. There are some limitations in the Arc Welder like only one app can be loaded at a time, and you have to select landscape or portrait layout. However, you can load multiple apps by selecting the download ZIP option in Arc Welder and extracting it and then enabling extension developer mode to load the folder of the extracted APK. The most apps run really well but there are some exceptions like Gmail and Chrome for Android shows Google Play Services errors, but that’s not because ARC doesn’t support them. Developers will need to optimize their apps for ARC, and some Google Play Services are also supported right now, making that process a lot easier.
Also see our last post: Office Lens app now available for iOS and Android