Android on Chromebooks...Does it make sense?

Let me start this blog by saying that I am not slamming Android. I've been an Android user ever since getting an Ion phone at Google I/O 2009. I still have that phone, in fact. It can be an interesting experience to compare the Android Cupcake running on it to the current Android versions like KitKat, Lollipop, and Marshmallow. Android has come a long way in seven years! I've also been an Android developer, with varying degrees of regularity, since the platform was introduced. I love the object-oriented design of the system and the elegant message-passing mechanism of Intents. A Smalltalk programmer would feel right at home working with Android. So, my concerns are not because of some hatred of Android. Far from it.

The idea of integrating Chrome OS and Android OS is an old one. Some of the earliest posts in the Chromebook forum were speculating about adding Android to Chromebooks. Some thought that there should be Chromebooks with keyboards that could rotate under the display (like today's Asus Flip) or where the keyboard could detach from what was essentially a tablet (the Pixel C). With the keyboard detached or the display rotated to portrait mode, the Hybridbook would boot Android OS instead of Chrome OS. Others just wanted to see Android OS and Chrome OS merged somehow, so that you could run both Android and Chrome apps on the same device. (This was largely realized on the Android side when the Chrome browser finally came to Android.)

My issues with Android OS on Chromebooks mostly come down to four things: incompatible user cases, usefulness of Android apps on a Chromebook, the Chromebook as reference implementation for the web platform, and security.

Incompatible Use Cases

Think about how you use mobile devices - especially your cell phone. When you use your phone you want to do something quickly: make a phone call, check your email, send a text, look up a movie time, find a restaurant, order some food, do a search, maybe play a game or watch a video if you have a few minutes to kill. What do all of these use cases have in common? You need some information quickly, so you want a highly focused app that starts up fast and gets you the information you need with a minimum number of required interactions. Most of what you do on your Android device is consume content. You're probably not writing the next great novel or even putting together the presentation you're planning to give at work on your Android device.

Now think about how you use your Chromebook. If you're like me, it's the first device you reach for when you want to write a document or create the slides for a presentation. I'm writing this blog on a Chromebook. I prefer it for doing research. It's much easier to open a number of webpages to be able to locate, read, and reference information on a Chromebook than it is on an Android device. I use it for taking online classes (I have yet to encounter an online education platform that doesn't run beautifully on a Chromebook). I use it to edit video with WeVideo. In concert with my Android phone and Google Photos, it is my photo album. I view, edit, and post my photos - all with a Chromebook. I even do what I didn't imagine would be possible on a Chromebook: program! The Chrome Dev Editor is a really nice local code editor with good GitHub integration, a built-in bower build system, and an integrated localhost. It is great for web programming, including with Polymer. Unfortunately, Google stopped developing it (more on this trend in a bit). Never fear though, there are still good options, like Cloud9, where you can use any tool you are used to using in Ubuntu through your Chromebook. You can program with 40 different languages and they have templates for HTML, Node, Ruby, Python, C++, Django, PHP and Apache, even Wordpress. And, it works offline. The big difference with my Chromebook is that I'm creating content - not consuming it.

Microsoft learned this lesson with Windows 8. They tried to integrate mobile devices and the desktop. but desktop users didn't want to have to tap icons and use swipe gestures to get their work done. The metro (modern) interface apps were generally pretty lame, especially to users who were used to traditional Windows programs. On the other hand, apps originally designed for the desktop didn't translate well to mobile - even if they did make the touch areas and icons larger. The clash of the incompatible desktop and mobile use cases made for a user experience that was painful for all Windows users. Microsoft seems to have learned their lesson with Windows 10, which defaults to a desktop interface on the desktop and a mobile interface on mobile, but it cost them a lot of customer support in the process.

Usefulness of Android Apps on a Chromebook

When you look at the specs for one of the Chromebooks that will be the first to allow running Android apps, the Chromebook Pixel 2, what is missing? Do you see an accelerometer? A gyroscope? A GPS receiver? A front-facing camera? No. Because those aren't normal sensors for a laptop. But, many Android apps rely on one or more of those sensors, because they are standard in mobile devices. 

I have been searching my brain (and the apps installed on my Android devices) to try to figure out which apps I would want to run on a Chromebook. Ingress? Nope. Won't work without GPS. Cardboard Camera? Won't work without a gyroscope, an accelerometer, or a GPS receiver. It would also be pretty hard to strap a Chromebook onto your head. Minecraft PE? We may be on to something here. A common complaint about Chromebooks is that they don't allow Java to be installed. Minecraft PE might finally be the way for all those Minecraft fans to get MC on their Chromebooks. Except that Minecraft PE isn't really the full-fledged Minecraft and the mobile-optimized controls are likely to get irritating very quickly on a Chromebook. Outlook? The mobile app is better than the web app, but I only use it to check office emails during my commute to work. Not really a compelling reason to run it on a Chromebook.

I really can't think of a single app I want to use on a Chromebook. And any app I did try to run would undoubtedly be a second-class experience on a Chromebook. Few apps are designed with a desktop mode in mind.

Can you think of an Android app you really want to run on Chrome OS?

Chromebook as Reference Implementation for the Web Platform

When the rocket hamster-adorned box first appeared on my doorstep back in late November 2010, I really wasn't sure what to think of it. A laptop that only runs the Chrome browser? What was the point? I waited for nearly a week before I finally opened the box and charged the battery. Then I tried it out. It took a little while, but I rapidly began to see that this was a new paradigm. It was a gateway to the web as a platform. It truly was a revolutionary idea that Google was trying to advance.

OK, maybe I'm being a bit hyperbolic. Anyone who has used a VT-100 "smart terminal" hooked up to some big iron in a computer center in a basement has seen the concept before. The difference was that the terminal really was smart (much more powerful than the VT-120s I used to use when I was an undergrad), the ethernet cables had been replaced by TCP/IP over WiFi or cellular service, and the VAX computer in the basement had been replaced by a multitude of server farms. But the advantages are all the same: your data is readily available on any machine with an Internet connection, applications are always the latest version, security patches are applied automatically, and you don't need to worry about a disk drive failure or losing a flash drive. Everything is there, waiting for you in the cloud when you need it. 

Google explained their vision of Chromebooks in a video during the Google I/O 2011 keynote in what I still consider to be the best design description I have seen done by any project. Entertaining, yet thoroughly describes the concept of Chrome OS in just under two minutes. Brilliant!

Sadly, Google seems to have lost this vision that was so clearly articulated in 2011. By 2012, the Chromebook was "for everyone" and the rolling fields of green were on the background of Chromebooks. Google was making Chrome OS look more like a standard OS with windows and a desktop and all the things we've come to take for granted after 30 years of the "personal computer." But these changes added complexity and detracted from the mental shift that is cloud computing. As succeeding years have gone by, Google seems to be focusing more and more on Android (only about 40 sessions at this year's I/O were related in any way to the web platform - that may seem like a lot, but that's less than a quarter of all the sessions at I/O 2016). Google's Dart language, which was launched to great fanfare at Google I/O 2012 as the modern tool for building scalable apps for the web platform, has been effectively reduced to a second-class language: it isn't a priority for Firebase integration (one of the hottest topics at I/O), new language updates seem to have slowed down, there wasn't a single Dart session at I/O this year, and Dartpad (the recommended IDE for Dart development) hasn't been updated to the current version of the Dart SDK. Google's Polymer project is getting a little bit more love as an essential component of Progressive Web Apps (which were the majority of the Web Platform presentations at this year's I/O), but there has been no replacement for the now abandoned Chrome Dev Editor and the Google Developer outreach for Polymer is just a shadow of the outreach for other Google products.

From the standpoint of the numbers (and Google prides themselves on being data-driven), the focus on Android is understandable. As of the date I am writing this, Android holds nearly 71% of the global mobile market share, more than three times the global share of iOS. That is a market dominance that is hard to ignore, but failing to put resources into the web platform seems a very short-sighted policy on Google's part. Especially since they were the first ones to really clearly articulate and demonstrate a vision of the web as a platform.

Security

I've saved one of my biggest concerns for last. Security. One of the things I love about my Chromebooks is their security. It was built in to Chrome OS from the beginning: Sandboxed execution for browser tabs, verified boot, and the ability to restore to factory condition, if needed. No operating system is 100% secure (unless you never power it up), but Chrome OS has been the most secure system I've ever used. Android, on the other hand, has had a focus on being open and easy for developers to use. This isn't to say that Android doesn't take security into account, but the Android approach is the more traditional OS approach: sign apps to try to identify where they've come from, respond quickly to identified vulnerabilities, and maintain the integrity of the core OS. But, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of vulnerabilities that could be exploited. Android is more like Windows than Chrome OS when it comes to security.

So, how is Google going to integrate Android into Chrome OS? Details are difficult to track down, but it appears that the approach is to integrate a container (ala Docker) containing a full implementation of the latest Android runtime into future builds of Chrome OS. I love Docker containers. We are in the process of "containerizing" some of the open source projects I am working on to make it easier for new contributors to onboard: the entire development environment they need to get started can be put into the container. But a container is not like the Native Client (NaCl) approach the Chrome OS team was taking before (which allowed native execution of code within a sandboxed execution environment) and it is also not like a virtual machine, which is essentially a virtual computer running in a sandbox. Containers access the underlying operating system directly and rely on hashed user ids and permission controls to prevent users (apps) from acting maliciously. 

The problem with containers is there are concerns about how effective their security is. Even proponents of containers point out that they have to be implemented very carefully to prevent introducing vulnerabilities. Now, I know that the Chrome OS team are very talented engineers and I have the utmost respect for their capabilities, but containers are relatively new to production applications. Do they really know all the possible vulnerabilities? I already mentioned the vulnerabilities in Android. Now, if we combine those with the potential vulnerabilities of containers, will it really be possible to consider Chrome OS secure? If Chromebooks start getting compromised, how long will it take to damage their reputation for security? And, even if I don't enable the Android integration on my Chromebooks, the code is still there in the Chrome OS image installed on my Chromebook. How secure will it be?

Pardon my not dancing

So, with all of these things considered, you'll have to excuse me if I don't dance with joy as most of the tech press and many users are about this news. Maybe I'm wrong and this really will be the best thing that ever happened to Chromebooks, but I'm honestly not seeing that as the case. It seems that Google is just wandering ever farther from their once innovative and brilliant vision for the web platform.

Time to resurrect this blog!

First (fuzzy) photo of my Cr-48. I still have it, but it has been relegated to the storage closet.

As you may have noticed in my last blog post (from over four years ago!), I wasn't finding much to write about my Cr-48. It had become such an integral part of my life that I really didn't give it much thought anymore. Once the next generation of Chromebooks came out, I got an Acer AC700 and a Samsung Series 5. These served me well (and still do, though they have been relegated to being my recipe book in the kitchen and a quick reference source on my workbench). Next, I got a Samsung Series 5 550 (which I am typing this blog post on right now) and a Chromebox, followed by a Samsung ARM Chromebook and a Pixel - and several Chromecasts. Now a whole new generation of Chromebooks has come out (including a new Pixel and the soon-to-be-released Chromebit). Chromebooks have been my go-to devices for 95% of the work I do with a computer and I always have at least one with me anywhere I go. When I first got the Cr-48 back in 2010, I was very skeptical about cloud computing, but now I have become a convert. I can't imagine carrying around a pocket full of thumb drives or fretting about backing up my hard drive regularly. It is so convenient to work collaboratively with colleagues (without having to send a barrage of emails with attachments back and forth) and to have access to my data from any computer, anywhere that has an Internet connection. (And, let's face it, Microsoft ads to the contrary, it is very rare for a computer to be off of the Internet - even Windows 10 won't work properly without a connection.)

So, why am I reviving this blog after so long? I realized there are a few things I have questions about, like which one of the latest generation of Chromebooks should I buy (or do I really need the latest generation at all)? Which hosting site should I use for my web pages? Which cloud storage options are available and is there one that will be better for my needs than Google Drive? I do web and mobile development, which continues to be the biggest challenge on a Chromebook. Which IDE would work the best for me? Which online education sites work best with a Chromebook? I figure if I have these questions, other people might as well. So, welcome back to Living in the Cloud - I'll try to answer these questions and any other questions that come up. If there's a question you have, just drop it in the comments and I'll do my best to answer it. At the very least, I hope you'll find something of interest here!

Haven't posted in a while...

I realized I haven't posted anything in a while. The reason is simple...the Cr-48 has become such an integral part of my life, that I just don't think about it now.  I am looking forward to what the commercial offerings are going to look like later this year.  Could be quite interesting.  I just hope they keep the price point low.  I can't imagine too many people willing to pay more than $200 for a Chrome notebook.

I've also decided to get involved with the Chromium OS project.  I bought a Dell Latitude d420 on eBay to do Chromium OS development on.  The d420 was nice because I got it for less than $200, but it still has a 64-bit processor, sufficient RAM (compiling the OS is still a slow process), and ample hard disk space to accommodate Ubuntu 10.04LTS and the Chromium OS virtual machine.  Should be a fun project to work on.

Follow up on the sandbox

So...it turns out that flash apps don't currently run in the sandbox on the Cr-48, which would explain why the flash app I was running was able to break out of the sandbox - it wasn't in there!  Something that is being fixed (in fact, it should be fixed in the Windows release of Chrome), but I'm still not crazy about the notion that Google has been allowing apps to run outside of the sandbox, even though I can understand that the Chrome OS developers probably thought that cutting corners during the development process would be worth it in order to get more functionality out to the app developers and testers earlier.

This incident did motivate me to get involved with the open source Chromium OS project, so I can better understand the details of the OS.  Just bought a Dell Latitude D420 off of eBay that I'm going to make into a dedicated Chromium development and test machine.  (I wouldn't dare mess with the Cr-48 - it's become too essential to me and I want to keep testing the betas of the "official" Chrome OS releases.)  Can't wait to get that machine here and start digging in to the OS.  Chrome OS really is an innovative computing model!

Breach of the sandbox?

I was looking for a better screenshot extension than the Simple Screenshot extension I had been using, so I downloaded the Aviary Screen Capture extension from the Chrome Store. Nice, full featured image capture and editing tool.  Then I went to save a screenshot locally, and it brought up the Linux root directory!  I've been trying to use the Cr-48 in its "pure form" to see just how much can be done using only cloud computing (and I've been pleasantly surprised at how much I have been able to do), so I've never switched on the developer switch or tried to force a boot into the Linux (although I knew it was there). This is the first time I've seen the underlying OS directories listed on this machine and they were being displayed by a web app that was supposed to be operating inside the Chrome OS sandbox.  Looks like that extension has broken the Chrome security model. And, if it can do it, what's preventing another extension from doing the same, but not being so blatant about it?  If this extension really has broken the Chrome OS security model, that eliminates one of the primary strengths of the Chrome OS. Part of the reason for giving up the ability to run local apps in Chrome OS is to have a more secure machine. If a Chrome extension can gain root access, might as well dump Chrome OS for Android!

Follow up on video fix

Well, it looks like the video was much improved but there's been something of a regression on the audio side. I have to reboot daily to get the audio to stream again. Works great after the reboot, but I really shouldn't have to do that! (In fairness, I have had the same problem with UNR, so the issue may be in the Linux codecs and not in Chrome.)

Streaming video

I don't know if it's the last OS update pushed out the other day or opting in to the HTML5 video beta, but streaming video playback has been much improved. Audio streaming continues to be very good, but now the video is also smooth with very little chop or aliasing. The Cr-48 video playback is as good as my Windows desktop and my Linux netbook now. Very nice!

Update on audio issues

Well, it's been more than a week since the last Chrome OS update was pushed out to my Cr-48 and it looks like the audio issue is fixed. It has been rock solid!  (Pun only partly unintended.)

Audio issues since Chrome OS updates

Like many people around the world, I have been glued to the Al Jazeera coverage of the popular uprising in Egypt, which really highlighted a problem that started to occur after the Chrome OS update I posted about last month.  After the update, the audio in audio or video feeds would suddenly turn into a mix of static and squealing. The only way to fix it was to restart the Cr-48.  But, it looks like the last update that just loaded last week may have fixed it - here's hoping!

I just don't think about it anymore...

I realized I haven't posted anything for a while.  The reason is simple: the Cr-48 has become such an integral part of my life that I don't even think about it anymore. It's the first machine I reach for when I want to do anything on the web, it's constantly in my backpack - it's just part of my life now.  The only thing I really haven't been able to do with the Cr-48 is development. I've tried some of the Google Labs development tools and, of course, the Google developer tools; but it really is very limited. Not that I've given up!

The server encountered an error. Please try again later.

Not the kind of message you want to see when using a computer that will only work by connecting to the cloud, but it was the message I got from Google Docs this morning. Server outages and holes in WiFi/3G coverage are what is going to make it difficult for ChromeOS to get large scale adoption.  Even in a corporate environment, which I still view as the sweet spot for a machine like the Cr-48, at least with a regular PC if the server is down you can still do some work locally while waiting for the server to be brought up. With the Cr-48, you are pretty much in a work stoppage. You can continue working on a document you started (for a while, at least) and you can read a page you've already opened, but you can't start anything new. I'm sure that these are issues that will be worked out, eventually - especially as the offline capabilities of HTML become more widely implemented and  wireless coverage is improved to serve the increasing number of smart devices - but there are still some issues with the technology today.

WiFi locked up

Had the first real OS freeze on the Cr-48 tonight. I had disabled the WiFi because I had lost the Internet connection, but the router was still up - so I wanted to force the Cr-48 to connect to 3G.  When I got the Internet back up on my network, I couldn't get the WiFi enabled again without rebooting the notebook. Pretty frustrating, but it was the first time I've had an issue like that.

Celtic Punk

Went on an alcohol-fueled Celtic punk binge tonight (pathetic, I know - at least I wasn't drinking alone, my dog was with me!).  Came to the realization that the Cr-48's speakers REALLY suck.  At least it sounds good through headsets...

OS update

Got the first Chrome OS update since I've been using my Cr-48. Very simple. Very fast. Really no different than doing a browser update. (I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at that.) All I had to do was click the tool icon (the wrench) and agree to restarting the OS. A few seconds later, the OS was updated and I was back to the login page. Nice.

Off to school

The new semester started today and I wanted to see how well I could get by using only the Cr-48.  I'll admit that I did have a "backup" netbook with me, my eeePC 901, but I didn't need it!  Chrome OS and the Cr-48 got me through a full day of classes and research from 8:30 to 4:30.  The Cr-48 was in nearly continuous use, on battery.  I didn't have any problems connecting to the university network or to the various secure course websites I needed for classes.  I was able to view all of the course materials (PDFs and PowerPoint slides, mostly) with no problems and I took my class notes using Google Docs.  I feel much more confident now in taking only the Cr-48 with me to class.  The one remaining question is how much development I can do on the Cr-48. Stay tuned!

Video night

Testing out video streaming by trying a few different sources.  Tried to sign up for the Netflix free trial to stream some movies there, but - wouldn't you know it - they use the MS Silverlight plug in for their video-on-demand service.  I am not willing to use Silverlight even on a Windows machine, so I turned around and cancelled the Netflix membership.  Then, I went over to Hulu and watched some classic Star Trek episodes.  They were pretty low res with a lot of jerkiness in the feed, but I blame that on the conversion to digital because the commercials were perfect.  Finally, watched a little bit of some Google I/O 2010 session videos.  Worked just as well as my Linux or Windows laptops, basically limited by my WiFi bandwidth more than the machine.  All-in-all, the video experience with the Chrome OS was very good, with the already noted exception of not being able to view content in a platform-centric plug in, like Silverlight (which I blame Netflix, not Google, for)

Gettin' some work done

Using Google Docs on the bus yesterday and today to get my budget worked out, update my CV, and figure out my program of study at Utah State (especially which classes I need to retake).  I've used Docs on and off since they were first introduced.  At first, they were really unusable except for the most rudimentary of tasks.  (You could probably use the word processor to make a grocery list, but not much else.)  Now, however, they are really getting pretty good.  Granted, it's not Office, but I actually think Office has become so "feature" loaded and bloated that it's not really usable, either.  That, and the fact that it keeps trying to force you to make your document look the way that some programmer in Redmond thinks it should look, instead of how you want it to look, makes Google Docs a refreshing return to a "just enough functionality to get the job done and no more" philosophy that most office suites have strayed from.

Using Google Docs with the Cr-48's 3G has been a great experience.  Docs saves the work frequently enough that I never have to think about manually saving the file. When I'm getting ready to close the laptop to throw it in my backpack, the document has always just been saved - so I don't need to worry about it.  When I open the notebook back up, there's my document ready for me to work on it again.  Very nice!  The autosave is also very efficient, so I've been getting a lot of use out of the free 100MB per month that the Cr-48 comes with.  In fact, the Chrome OS seems to be very frugal with its bandwidth usage.  I know I wouldn't have been able to do as much on 3G with my Windows or Linux laptops.

Games! Games! Games!

"Installed" some games from the Chrome Apps Store. (An installation is really just creating an icon for the URL on the Chrome OS home page.)  Some fun games available there: some great old Atari classics (that I can sadly remember spending many a quarter on and playing on my Atari 800 and 2600), the World Golf Tour golf games, Lord of Ultima, and Shredder Chess (a great chess game).  I also tried the two pre-installed games: Entanglement and Poppit.  Both very addictive!

There were some issues. For example, on the Atari games, the control buttons block the game display when in full screen mode.  I suspect this is more an issue with Atari than Chrome.  Another problem was going to Pogo.com (the host site for Poppit) to play some of their other games. The site popped up an alert box that Java needed to be installed. How do you install Java for Chrome OS?  It shouldn't be possible (except perhaps as a temporary install) given the architecture of the Chrome sandbox.  Granted, I could force it by booting the notebook to Linux using the USB port, but for this evaluation period I am trying to keep the Chrome installation pure to get a feel for how the typical end user would make use of the machine.  It is certainly a limitation that you wouldn't have with any other notebook.  But it does support what I see as the biggest niche for a machine like the Cr-48: corporate notebooks for a company that has gone to an external or internal cloud architecture for their IT.  Having been a network admin and having provided tech support for internet appliances, I see the inability for users to make significant changes to their machines, especially installing executables, and the ability to update and backup applications and data in the cloud as the real strength of this computing model.

Speaking of games, I noticed the latest release of Chrome OS hasn't incorporated WebGL yet.  I hope that WebGL will be added to the stable Chrome release soon, because I'd really like to try out the new 3D content!

No mic jack?

I was (trying to) watch some videos while on the train tonight (the train WiFi was just too slow) when I realized there isn't a mic jack on the Cr-48.  There is an integrated mic next to the camera; but, when wearing a headset, it would be preferable to have a jack for the mic on the headset.  Not exactly a major issue, but it couldn't possibly be that difficult to include two jacks for a headset.

More display flickering

I had another automatic backlight control issue this morning.  A cat hair was laying directly across the camera lens, which was making the display flicker - especially at the top of the screen.  Apparently, the part-dark, part-light image going to the camera was really confusing the backlight dimming algorithm.  I removed the hair and the flickering stopped.  I'm not sure the automatic backlight dimming is worth the problems it seems to have with bright lights being periodically blocked by shadow and by things like hair or dirt getting on the camera lens.