Comment by iamcalledrob
4 days ago
I struggle to imagine existing Android apps being useful in a desktop form factor.
It's not just about touch vs mouse/keyboard, it's the whole interaction design philosophy.
And it's not as if you can say that getting the Android developer experience on desktop is going to entice developers. Compose is decent, but the actual Android system APIs make Win32 look brilliant. At least Win32 is stable.
For this to be viable, there has to be a bigger strategy than just "Android apps and APIs on a desktop" -- because neither of those are appealing.
Users and developers will just stick with the web.
ChromeOS already had an android adapter layer and apps would run windowed, with an option to respect the original size or allow arbitrary resize.
I assume we're in the same situation with Samsung's Dex ?
It worked decently well, the main issues were unrelated to the handling in itself (the Bluetooth stack was dead for android apps, trying the smart appliance stuff was just a fool's errand)
Right -- it technically "works", but I don't think you'd want to actually be productive in these existing Android apps on the desktop.
Imagine the experience of trying to write a paper in Android Google Docs, vs firing up the web version.
Games perhaps being a big exception.
I don't use Docs to write novels, but for basic official documents and a few reports I'm looking at, there's very few things missing.
When in phone view a lot of the options are hard to find, but in tablet/desktop mode (yes, that's a thing already) it's really close to what you get on the web. The main different is the menu layout, where most advanced functionalities go to an extended menu instead of the standard File/Edit/View/Insert... menus at the top of the page.
Otherwise there seem to be most of what's needed, including extensions apparently. Perhaps media management could be tougher, it's supported by on don't how much of a PITA it could be, I haven't pushed that far on the android version.
> I struggle to imagine existing Android apps being useful in a desktop form factor.
Rather than full desktops, I suspect that Desktop Android will be popular for 2-in-1 style devices like the Surface Pro.
I've always thought that the Surface Pro was a good idea, just with the wrong operating system. Newer iPad Pros kind of accomplish the same, but are still too locked down by Apple to be a true computer replacement.
Android has the potential to be the perfect middle ground: touch-centric UI paradigm, can work well with keyboard/mice, and open/flexible enough to be an actual computer replacement.
Google has been working on adding extensions to Chrome on Android, already has apk sideloading, and has work-in-progress Linux VM support. That's likely "good enough" to replace computers for the vast majority of people.