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Chromebooks And Android Nougat: Where Things Stand

By 16 Comments

by Gabriel Brangers
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Early last month we were excited to share that Android N is being actively polished for Chrome OS in the experimental Canary channel. When the Play Store makes its way out of Beta (we’re expecting that to happen in late April), it is our hope that many of the stability issues of Android apps will be resolved.

Our friend +Yanny Mishchuk is back with more good news about the continuing work on Android N for Chrome OS.




At first glance back in January we saw that resizing of apps was being implemented. Along with it came multi-window support similar to what you see on the latest Android phones with Nougat.

The Bad News

When Android N first debuted on the Canary channel it was buggy. I mean really buggy. The UI was so finicky at times it was all but unusable.

Fast forward 2 months. The features haven’t changed much but the experience is a whole other story. As Yanny reports:

I have reenabled the Play Store on my Thinkpad 13, and have found that the Nougat update has seen massive improvements.

This is great news. As we wait for the official roll-out of the Play Store and the removal of the “Beta” label, the advancement of Android 7.1.1 gives us hope that we will see the update to N sooner than later.




Not only are Android N’s features working better but Yanny goes on to share that the overall performance of his Lenovo ThinkPad has greatly improved.

I constantly use crouton on my device for all sorts of stuff, graphic design, and gaming…and in the past, I never really liked using the Play Store on my Chromebook because even when I was’t running any apps and only crouton was running all of the background processes slowed down my device drastically, even Chrome OS felt sluggish back then. Now though, I can happily run crouton and even have some Android apps open with little to no slow downs. The experience is very smooth all around.

Yanny Mishchuk

The Android ecosystem on Chrome OS is still in its infancy at best. There’s a lot of work to be done to make it fully functional and create a satisfying user experience. But, rest assured that Android Apps are coming and developers are working diligently to make sure they tidy up all the lose ends.

Special thanks to Yanny for daring out to the bleeding edge of Chrome OS.

  • I am looking forward to it. Is 7.1 always running in the background or called up to run Android apps? also I have the Plus, am I currently running Marshmallow? Im a little confused.

    • Settings > Google Play Store (beta) > Manage your Android Preferences > About Device

      My Chromebook Plus show Android 6.0.1 (Marshmellow) with the stable Channel. I think all stable channel chromebooks that have android apps are the same.

      • DumbledorBoB

        Same 6.0.1 version on my Lenovo N22 in the Developer Channel, Dev Mode. 🙁

        I docked it # half hour ago and haven’t seen the screen flicker or go blank. Yet.

  • Dave

    So now the play store is not rolling out til late April! ? That will make almost a year since it was announced, they announced this way too early! I’ve been waiting patiently but I’m starting to get frustrated.

    • Karena

      I’m getting frustrated by the process as well.

  • pwndecaf

    Is there a commitment to have all capable Chrome OS devices run the latest versions of Android as they come along? Is there an indication of what the requirements would be? I have three Chromebooks, but the Acer R11 is the only one currently capable of running Android, and yet it seems to be some kind of a freak in that it got Android on the Stable channel early.

    • Karena

      I have the Acer R11 and am on the stable channel with still no access to the playstore.

  • So I’ve been reading about Nougat available in Canary, and thinking, why doesn’t my Chromebook Flip C100P, which was the first device to get Play Store, and on which I’m running Dev channel, have Nougat?

    I googled to see if Canary is different than Dev, and it is. (Maybe chromeunboxed has covered this already, I was not aware.) It is not intended to be used by the public. But there is a way for anyone on Dev channel to enable it: Open a crosh window (ctrl-alt-t) and type “live_in_a_coal_mine”.

    My C100 is my backup / travel laptop (for daily use I have a first gen Toshiba Chromebook 2) so I’m going to try it out. It seems to be updating now:

    crosh> live_in_a_coal_mine
    Are you sure you want to change to the canary channel? [y/N] y
    [0221/111308:INFO:update_engine_client.cc(422)] Channel permanently set to: canary-channel
    [0221/111308:INFO:update_engine_client.cc(440)] Current Channel: dev-channel
    [0221/111308:INFO:update_engine_client.cc(443)] Target Channel (pending update): canary-channel
    crosh>

    • Gabriel Brangers

      Yes, Canary is beyond Dev. Give it a few minutes and you will get an update arrow. Nougat is still in testing phase which is why it hasn’t made its way to the dev channel. Once you have made it to canary you should see Android 7.1.1. It is a little buggy though. I crashed multiple times anytime I tried to open up settings which is now Material Design by default. Android is working very well though. Good Luck

  • What version of Chrome OS are you running to obtain access to the Play Store on the ThinkPad 13 ?

  • Jack Smith

    Really excited but wish Google would go faster. Also Google turn on instant tethering with your wonderful mesh WiFi and our Chromebooks.

    Changed the home Wifi password and had a very long flight to have very upset kids leaving voicemails. All my kids now have Chromebooks and I installed a three pack of the Google WiFi over the holidays and had assumed it would come with instant tethering. Every kid is logged into their Chromebooks with Google accounts!

    Why on earth are we still using antiquated WiFi passwords?

    • Jeff

      If you have an antique password just change it to something more modern like this one: w[}Q,Dt@8%!c)g$wr)P;

  • Thanks, I’m on Canary but no Nougat, still Marshmallow with Feb 2017 security update. Surely Google is testing Nougat on the C100PA, wonder what’s missing here. I tried disabling and re-enabling Play Store beta to no effect.

    Do you know if Nougat’s Night Light feature works on the Chromebooks? I have it on my Xperia X with Sony’s Nougat concept softare, and it is much better than the Android and Chrome apps that try to serve this purpose e.g. Twilight, g.lux, Screen Shader.

    • Interesting to hear that not every device on the canary channel is getting Nougat, but unfortunately their is no way to enable night mode at the moment, whether it is present or not, this is because there is no way to access the quick settings to enable it. And System UI Tuner can’t be accessed either because that requires that you have access to quick settings, which we don’t. I’m not sure if they will implement quick settings at all, though I doubt they would because we already have quick settings inside of Chrome OS itself…