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Awesome. It's much easier to make Android (with it's massive app ecosystem) a desktop OS than it is than to build an app ecosystem for traditional Linux desktops.

Interestingly enough it doesn't look like there's an installer - they want you to run it from USB for now.




There is also project "shashlik" by the KDE folks which, if it works as advertised at some point, should make it possible to run Android apps natively in Linux.

https://github.com/shashlik/shashlik


Neat. I've been using ARC with chrome for a couple of apps that i grabbed from my phone with adb. This looks like it'll eventually be pretty nice to avoid having to open chrome for them.


How well does that work?


Except that massive app ecosystem is designed for small screen phones and single window design.

It also hasn't helped Windows Mobile at all with it's "massive" desktop ecosystem.


Imo if you can run existing Android apps in resizable windows it would be a huge win. There are many well made Android apps that would work just fine as their own windowed applications


some would definitely work pretty well.

Several streaming services have native apps on both mobile & desktop. I think that their mobile apps could run pretty well on desktop.

For many complex apps though (like anything dealing with text edition), the lack of hover & right clics handling would be a pain. Android supports 'hover' events (and since API 1 IIRC) but nobody implements them in custom widgets.

Android supports mouse input but even as an android engineer I have no idea what the right click does in that situation.


http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEv...

BUTTON_SECONDARY is reported in the getButtonState() of the MotionEvent, but I'm not sure most apps ever check that. I would guess in a lot of cases, if there is only checking on pointer down and up, it will act like the left mouse button.


I know this is a cop-out, but wouldn't Google Docs work just fine in the browser here. I mean I haven't done any work on Google Docs, but I did use it all the way through uni.

Or maybe we should just force everyone on Vim and world would be more glorious and productive place.... right?


Not sure Windows is similar: Windows Phone has very few apps, Windows 8 desktop has very few 'modern' apps which can handle being distributed through an app store. Neither can leverage the other because there's nothing to leverage.


Small-screen phones and medium-screen tablets. And some netbooks. Pretty much the same as the set of devices Windows 8's Metro UI was designed for.

Look what Windows 10 did with Metro apps: it took those "single-window designs" and just... stuck them in regular windows. And that works pretty well, it turns out.


So...we went from windowed apps to fullscreen apps and thence to windowed apps. Yaaaaay, fabulous progress! ;)


From mainframes to Personal computers to Citrix. Progress too ;)


Another option would be to be able to run Android apps on traditional Linux desktops. I hope that will be possible in the future, right now there isn't anything that achieves that seamlessly.


Except that the android apps almost all suck. I'd far rather have the Debian repository on my phone than Google play on my laptop.




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