Google’s lightweight, browser-based Chrome OS is about to gain hundreds of thousands of apps overnight — literally. On Wednesday at its I/O conference in San Francisco, Google announced that the Play Store — the app store for Android smartphones — is heading to Chromebooks.
Updated on 05-19-2016 by Kyle Wiggers: Added the update’s time frame and a list of supported Chromebooks.
The Mountain View, California, company hasn’t formally announced the integration yet, but a description for a Google I/O Chrome lays out the essentials:
“Today … we’re adding the best mobile app experiences in the world, Android apps and the Google Play store, to the best browser in the world, Chrome! Come to this session and test your Android apps for Chrome OS. You will get hands-on help from our friendly engineers on how to optimize your Android app for Chromebooks.”
Google says the upgrade will land in mid-June for three Chromebook models — the Acer Chromebook R11, Asus Chromebook Flip, and Google Chromebook Pixel (2015) — in mid-June, with more to gain Play Store support in the coming months.
The benefits of Play Store integration are numerous. Google will likely announce the details at Thursday’s session, but Chrome OS could theoretically tap into the Play Store’s broader payment support — the stagnating Google Checkout, the Google Web Store’s payments platform of choice, supports far fewer countries (36 versus the Play Store’s 136) and payment methods (no prepaid gift cards, for one) than the Play Store. And developers might be able to take advantage of the Play Store’s significantly more mature deployment features, including A/B testing, staged app rollouts, developer replies, and others.
News of the Play Store’s arrival on Chrome isn’t exactly earth-shattering. Last month, eagle-eyed Reddit user TheWiseYoda spied a setting in an early release of Chrome OS — version 51 in the Developer Channel — that referenced a way to enable Android Apps on Chromebook devices. It wasn’t functional, but several users were able to launch from it a “getting started” tutorial with instructions on configuring a Chrome OS variant of Google’s Play Store.
The groundwork for the migration has long been laid. In 2014, Google launched a beta of App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), a toolkit aimed at assisting developers in building Chrome-compatible versions of their native Android apps. Later that year, Google began letting publishers seed Android apps to seed users, but in a limited fashion — installs were restricted to the Chrome Web Store. And last year, it added support within Chrome for Google Play Services, a proprietary collection of services for authentication, contact synchronization, and location-based systems, and other APIs on which many apps rely.
The Play Store may be just the beginning of a bigger Android and Chrome OS merger to come, if the rumors are true. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google had been working for two years to merge Chrome OS and Android, and that it planned to launch the result — a new, unified operating system that runs on PCs — in 2017.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.