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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.
