Living with Chromebook: Android Apps (Premium)

If you think that Chromebooks must be online to work and can only run web apps and sites, you’re not paying attention. In recent years, this platform has picked up support for two key application platforms, Android and Linux, dramatically expanding its capabilities while—spoiler alert—also driving up the complexity. 

Let’s start with Android, since the app library is so large, and because this addition impacts far more people.  

The appeal is obvious: The Google Play Store is the largest app store on earth, and its availability on Chromebook exponentially improves the apps situation on that platform. It’s a no-brainer, right?  

Well, yes. And no. In Facebook parlance, it’s complicated. 

In the plus column, Android app support completes the Chrome OS application story in many ways. That is, being forced to use only web apps and sites can be limiting, in the same way that Windows 10 is limiting in S mode. You’ll find that most of what you want to do is, in fact, available, unless of course you have very particular needs. But there’s always that one app, that one thing you need that throws you off. And over time, as these missing pieces add up, the platform seems less and less viable. 

Google’s solution is a good one, at least theoretically until all the wrinkles are ironed out. That is, being able to run Android apps should pretty much overcome that missing piece for most users. Android, after all, has all the apps. So to speak. 

But again, it’s complicated. 

The first complication is that Android app developers, for whatever reason, have not done as good a job converting their offerings to work well on the large displays found on Chromebooks. This issue has doomed Android tablets, just as the widespread support for larger displays in the iOS developer community has made the iPad so compelling. (A semi-related issue is that some Android apps still don’t recognize or in any way customize to support other unique Chrome OS and Chromebook features, despite Google supporting this in its Android APIs.) 

What that means is that some apps will simply look/work better if you let them run as if they were on a smartphone, in a small, smartphone-shaped window. Consider Microsoft OneDrive as a good example. When used maximized on a Chromebook, this app doesn’t do anything to customize the display to make better use of the bigger display. All I could really do here is display the view in thumbnails and maybe see more on the screen at once.  

(OneDrive also doesn’t do anything special to support a mouse or touchpad. So when you mouse over its icons, no tooltip appears to explain what the icons do.) 

When you restore this app to its native size/shape, all becomes clear: This app was designed only for smartphones, and its user interface assumes that form factor. 

Is it weird to use an application in this kind of window on a desktop-type PC? Sure. It does work, of course. It just takes some getting used to. 

The second and, I think, bigger issue is that adding Android app support to Chrome OS introduces application duplication. So in addition to having three ways to install/use apps—the Chrome OS Web Store, the web itself, and now the Google Play Store for Android apps—you’re going to run into many instances in which there are two versions of apps you wish to use, one web-based and one Android-based. And it’s never entirely clear which is the better choice. 

I wish there was some sage advice I could offer here. In fact, this article is appearing weeks later than I expected in part because I’ve been experimenting with different application duplicates in the hope of a shining moment of clarity that never arrived. Instead, I can offer only some bad news: Which app you should use will depend on your needs and will be different on an app-by-app basis. In other words, the onus is on you as a Chromebook user to figure out, in each case, which works better for you. And then to stay up on any improvements that come later to either version to determine whether those changes impact your decision. 

As a Microsoft guy, I’ve naturally experimented with the Microsoft apps that I use every day in Windows. Word is a good example. The Android version of Word has, in fact, been customized to work correctly on the larger displays you’ll find on Chromebooks and Android tablets. It visually resembles the Word Mobile app for Windows 10 that Microsoft no longer offers and appears to provide the same basic feature set.  

And aside from a few little usability issues—no mouse-over tooltips and a weird issue where you’re typing towards the bottom of the screen and the line you’re working on can become half-hidden under the bottom of the viewable area—it pretty much meets my needs. (I should commend this app for at least supporting right-click, though I assume that was an automatic feature based on press and hold. At least you get a context menu.) 

Word Mobile also offers a nice (OS X-like) columnar file browser for finding what you’re looking for in OneDrive, which is helpful since Chrome OS doesn’t offer any (good) native OneDrive sync/file system support. It’s a byproduct of the app being designed for phones—each column represents one phone screen’s worth of information. And it’s different from what I’m used to, a different workflow, but it’s workable. 

But Word Online—sorry, Microsoft I’m going to keep using that term for clarity—is better in some ways. The performance is better, for starters: While Word Mobile does work well, there is that faint hint of the text display being a bit behind my typing, and I don’t see that in Word Online. The look is more natural, too, with normally sized on-screen controls and next. And, God help me, there are mouse-over tooltips like a real application. 

A deeper issue here, perhaps, will be the command set: Both Word Mobile and Word Online offer different subsets of the commands that are available in the full Microsoft Word for Windows product. And this is where the “depending on your needs” bit comes into play. In the Home ribbon on Word Online, you’ll see the Format Painter button, which I use a lot. But it’s not available in Word Mobile. Navigate around the tabs and you’ll see other differences. 

But the biggest issue of all, I think, is that it doesn’t matter which is “better” in some ways because only Word Mobile offers offline support. You will need to be online to access Word Online. Unlike with Google’s web-based productivity solutions—Google Docs and so on—Microsoft hasn’t taken the important step of adding offline support. Doing so would make it a real application, in my view, where now it’s just a website. 

In this case, picking a winner is further complicated by the fact that I’ll need both versions of the app. I may prefer the web version, and I do in this case. But I will also want to work offline, so I’ll need the Android version as well. Ah boy. 

Despite the complexities of this arrangement, it’s still a net positive to have Android apps on Chromebook, of course. And the entire point of this experiment was to interrupt my normal workflow and try to rebound from those things that don’t work the way I’m used to. But Word and OneDrive are just two examples, and as you dive deeper into your preferred lists of apps and services, you may find, as I have, that moving to a Chromebook isn’t going to be quite as simple as you first thought. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just something you need to prepare for. 

Note: Yes, this article and its graphics were created, edited, and posted entirely in Chrome OS. This works surprisingly well, or perhaps I should say surprisingly similarly to the process on Windows.