You can now run almost any Android app on Chrome OS

Yes, you read that title right. Thanks to the hard work of one very enterprising developer, it is now possible to run almost any Android app on Chrome OS, or any computer that runs the Google Chrome web browser, including Windows, OS X, or Linux.

This is done through ArChron, by developer Vladikoff, which is a customized version of the Android Runtime for Chrome. Interested users can download his work, and load it as a standard Chrome extension in developer mode. Then, you must take an Android APK file and run it through another program that will convert it to a file that can be read by ArChron. There is a limit of four Android apps that can be running at a time, and each app is run as a separate Chrome extension.

There are some hiccups, of course – anything that relies on Google Play Services will crash, and there are bugs with some apps. However, the vast majority of Android apps will run just fine, including Skype, which is just awesome.

This is much more complicated than what Google is doing by porting over specific apps, but this at least shows that it is very possible to run a variety of Android apps on Chrome with no additional work on the part of developers, and this could signal a wider rollout of Android apps on Chrome in the very near future.

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