#Run android app for mac how to#

You'll have to enable 'developer mode' on Chrome and install a bunch of unpacked extensions. This makes the install process a little complicated. Google's original runtime is an extension, ARChon is an extension, and all the apps are extensions. ARC doesn't run raw Android app packages (APKs)-they need to be converted into a Chrome extension-but Vladikoff has a tool called ' chromeos-apk' that will take care of that, too.Įverything is done through Chrome's extension APIs. The hard part is getting Android apps that are compatible with it. It should get Android apps up and running on any platform running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up. While ARC was only officially released as an extension on Chrome OS, Native Client extensions are meant to be cross-platform. The main barrier to entry is obtaining ARC Chrome Web Store, which flags desktop versions of Chrome as 'incompatible.'įurther Reading Apple and Google move computing forward in identical-yet-incompatible waysVladikoff made a custom version of ARC, called ARChon, that can be sideloaded simply by dragging the file onto Chrome. The hack depends on App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which is built using Native Client, a Google project that allows Chrome to run native code safely within a web browser. You can now run Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Now he's made an even bigger breakthrough and gotten Android apps to work on any desktop OS that Chrome runs on.

#Run android app for mac how to#

First he figured out how to load any app on Chrome OS, instead of just the four that are officially supported. But a developer by the name of ' Vladikoff' has slowly been stripping away these limits. If you remember, about a week ago, Google gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps through the ' App Runtime for Chrome.' The release came with a lot of limitations-it only worked with certain apps and only worked on Chrome OS.