Remember earlier this year, when Android Authority discovered Google was experimenting with letting you run full Chrome OS on your Android device? In case you were wondering if that particular piece of spaghetti was sticking to the wall, I’m sorry to disappoint you it isn’t. Despite creating the Ferrochrome launcher app, which would’ve made the whole thing a one-click affair, Google has just removed the whole concept from the Android code base altogether.
Unfortunately, though, Google has decided to kill its Ferrochrome launcher app. This was revealed to us by a code change recently submitted to the AOSP Gerrit. The code change, which hasn’t been merged yet, removes the entire Ferrochrome launcher app from AOSP. Google’s reason for removing this app is that it doesn’t plan to ship it or maintain its code. It seems that Google is shifting towards using the Linux-based Debian distro instead of Chrome OS as its testbed for AVF development.
↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority
I’m not really sure if people were really asking for something like this, and to Google’s credit – for once – the company never even so much as hinted at releasing this to the general public. Still, the idea of carrying just your phone with you as your primary computer, and plugging into a display and input devices as the need arises, remains something a lot of people are fascinated with, and putting Chrome OS on your Android phone would’ve been one way to achieve this goal.
Despite decades of attempts, it seems not even the smartest people in Silicon Valley can crack this nut. Perhaps they should ask Gemini to solve it for them? It doesn’t involve pizza’s, glue, or rocks, so who knows – it might surprise them!
> Still, the idea of carrying just your phone with you as your primary computer, and plugging into a display and input devices as the need arises, remains something a lot of people are fascinated with, and putting Chrome OS on your Android phone would’ve been one way to achieve this goal.
Is this something people actually want? By the time you have all the accessories to make this work, you basically have something that’s more inconvenient than a laptop but costs a bit more. Everyone else’s attempts (Canonical, Microsoft, Motorola, now Google’s) seems to have all flopped.
For some people yes. In my workplace you can have remote working half of the week. I use a desktop. Some people carry a laptop and connect it to a monitor, keyboard, corporate network … For those people that only use that laptop at work and at home it would be more confortable to just carry their phone. And with remote desktops, Citrix&co raw power power isn’t as important.
Of course if you need to use a computer anywhere, anytime, a laptop is the way to go. Although a couple of days ago I watched a dude in YouTube that carries a mini-PC, keyboard, mouse and a portable monitor. Crazy stuff.
I’ve been daily-driving a Librem 5 for more than a year, and the convergence dream is already true over there.
The few times a day I need an Android app, I launch Waydroid.
If I need to get some work done and dont have my computer around, I just hook it up to a display and thats it.
Check it out.
Ironically it was Samsung that gave us a full Debian (Ubuntu?) desktop on the phone, but they too took it away.
I had long been searching a way to use all the processing power in my pocket as a portable computer. True, there are some “shells” that give your phone a full laptop makeover. But none was appealing.
(Here is a random list: https://liliputing.com/5-laptop-docks-that-let-you-use-a-smartphone-like-a-notebook/)
I tried Android Linux apps, which essentially try to make a chroot distribution. But without root, or OS support, they don’t work well.
And Samsung had arrived with DeX. It actually worked, and was a full fledged desktop, including development environment like vscode. Not sure, but I think my phone had 6GB at the time, which was enough.
Today, they only have a gimped version. They put the Android apps in a semi-desktop mode, and no longer allow full access.