Chromebooks are excellent devices that offer great value and a surprising amount of capability. This can be increased by the addition of Android apps, many of which can run on Chromebooks, albeit with a little help. Google recently announced the App Runtime for Chrome, which allows developers to adapt their Android apps to Chrome OS. So far four official apps have been released using this runtime – Evernote, Duolingo, Vine, and Sight Words – but with some effort it’s possible to get a lot more of them using this feature. Be warned though, performance can be very patchy, and during our experiments we encountered several issues that induced furious head scratching. But if you fancy a spot of gentle hacking, we’ll show you what you need to make this work, and how to do it.
While you might expect a trip to some developer sight in order to find the Runtime app, it’s actually a lot simpler than that. To install it on your Chromebook all you need to do is download any of the four apps mentioned above (Evernote, Duolingo, Vine, or Sight Words) and the Runtime app is automatically included in the package. So head to the Web Store on your Chromebook, search for Evernote , then click to install it. Notice that there are more than one version of Evernote listed. Ignore the one entitled Evernote Web, as this is just a shortcut to the online version.
To install an Android app on your Chromebook you’re first going to need the APK, which is the basic equivalent of an EXE file on Windows or a DMG on OS X. You’ll need to do this on a Windows or OS X machine, as Chromebooks can’t run the repacking software we’ll be using in the next step.
