Google’s Chrome OS Gets More Comfortable With Android

With the rather interesting Continuity features that Apple showed off during WWDC 2014, which make iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite powered devices play nice with each other, we expected Google to show us something along the same lines during its annual developers conference. And it did, even though its not entirely the same as Continuity, the new relationship between Chrome OS and Android works well for the entire ecosystem.

During his keynote speech Google’s Android chief Sundar Pichai showed off a new feature for Chrome OS. The feature lets users unlock their Chrome OS powered notebooks automatically using their Android devices.

Notifications work well across both platforms. Users won’t have to jump back and forth between their notebook and their Android phone when they’re working because notifications that pop up on either device will now be displayed on the other. So phone notifications are displayed on the Chromebook and vice versa.

Another major improvement in the relationship between Chrome OS and Android is that the former now gets the ability to run Android applications. Google made sure that the feature worked as though there was native support for Android apps on a Chromebook. Android apps were fired up straight from the Chrome OS launcher, apps like Vine, Flipboard and Evernote were demoed. Google didn’t reveal during the keynote what optimizations developers would have to make to their apps in order to make them work across both platforms.

End users will only get their hands on these features once the newly announced Android L release is shipped to customers this fall.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones, Computers
Tags: android l, chrome os, google i/o 2014