Based on the sheer volume of readers that find their way to my Minecraft on ChromeOS article (it’s our #11 article for all of 2022), I think it’s safe to say that playing Minecraft on a Chromebook is a hot topic. Unfortunately for Chromebook users, there’s no simple way to play the beloved 3D sandbox game that’s popular among players on just about every platform out there. You can install and play the Debian-based Java edition of Minecraft on a Chromebook that supports Linux applications but you’re missing out on the cross-play that’s available on the more widely adopted Bedrock version that’s available for PC, mobile, Xbox, Playstation, Switch and others. Majong, the maker of Minecraft, goes so far as to explicitly state that Minecraft is not supported on Chromebooks.
That’s not entirely true thanks to modern Chromebooks having access to the Google Play Store. Sadly, the only official version you can get is the Education Edition which requires a Microsoft Office 365 EDU account. There is a “hacky” way to use the Android version of Minecraft if you already own the game but it isn’t officially supported and I don’t know that I’d recommend it for everyday use. That’s just me. Honestly, I don’t understand why Majong and Microsoft wouldn’t want Minecraft distributed on the growing ChromeOS platform but they didn’t ask me.
Whatever the reason, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks to a tweet discovered by Beebom, we may have our first glimpse of hope that Minecraft may eventually be officially supported on consumer Chromebooks. @CagilMartin retweeted a photo of what appears to be a teardown of the latest Beta Preview of Minecraft and in it, a clear reference to a “Chromebook Trial.”
According to the tweet, this is the Bedrock version of Minecraft which leads me to believe that this could be a testing build for the Android version of Minecraft. It is possible that Majong and Google have collaborated to build a free-standing build of the game that will run in a container much the way Linux and Steam do but since there’s already an app in the Play Store, an Android version seems much more plausible.
As for if and when we could see a Beta version of Minecraft for Chromebooks is anyone’s guess. This code was found in the Beta build of Bedrock and the testing phase could very well be done internally before a public-facing preview is made available. I have reached out to the Twitter user Lilly / Beacon to see if they can provide any more detail on the code teardown and will report back with any updates. For now, it’s very good to know that there may be a possibility that Minecraft may finally be widely available on ChromeOS. In the meantime, you can check out my guides on how to play Minecraft on your Chromebook right now.
