Out of the four of us, only two managed to get ARC Welder to run Android apps on their computers-and of the two of them, one was on a Mac and the other on a PC. Interestingly, three other ReadWriters tried it out, all with varying successes and failures. That sad puzzle piece became my friend as my morning disappeared after countless attempts to make ARC Welder run an app…ANY app.
I should note that I tried downloading APKs from the site the post recommends, APKMirror, as well as backing up APK files from installed apps on my smartphone and moving those files to my PC for testing. I wasn’t able to make any of these apps run on my PC once-despite following instructions posted by 9to5Google to the letter. After testing apps ranging from Angry Birds to Google Maps to Yahoo Weather to Instagram, I came up empty handed.
Google isn’t kidding around by calling ARC Welder a beta release. I had hopes that ARC Welder could do much the same thing with fewer hiccups, since it came directly from Google. Alas, it was not to be. A year or so ago I experimented with Bluestacks and was relatively happy with the results, but it was still plagued with general bugginess and crashes.
Running Android apps on my PC has been high on my wish list for a while, mostly so I could play some Android-specific games that would really benefit from greater screen real estate. Maybe ARC Welder could actually start to convince developers to target Android first, iOS second, instead of the typical other way around. Considering the Google Play Store’s robust library, not to mention the popularity of the Chrome browser across nearly every computing platform, this kind of tool could potentially give app developers a huge leg-up in terms of spreading their wares. Yahoo Weather can transform from a mobile-only app to a Chrome app with just a couple of clicks.Įssentially, ARC Welder can vastly reduce the time and energy it might take for a developer to bring an app onto the desktop (or laptop, or MacBook, or Chromebook, or Chromebit…).
Which could in turn vastly expand the software available for Google’s steadily expanding lineup of Chromebook computers. See also: Chrome OS Hasn’t Conquered The World Yet, But Google Isn’t Giving Upīut where ARC Welder sets itself apart is that it actually turns Android apps into Chrome apps with a few mouse clicks. It might conceivably also be an easy way for independent developers to get feedback on early app versions from friends, family and colleagues, not all of whom may have Android devices to run them. For starters, it offers a quick-and-dirty way to test unfinished apps without having to fire up an integrated development program like Google’s Android Studio or to load them on separate devices. What It Means For DevelopersĪRC Welder’s implications go a step beyond previously released development tools. In practice, however, that’s just not the case-at least not yet. apk file extensions) right on their PCs or Macs.
In theory, ARC should also let anyone run an Android app install file (typically referred to as APKs because of their. Better yet, ARC Welder makes porting an Android app into a Chrome app ridiculously simple. With the ARC Welder app installed in your browser, you can theoretically run any Android app in a virtual environment without having to use any actual Android devices. On Wednesday, Google opened the beta of its latest developer tool- the App Runtime for Chrome, or ARC-to anyone on any computer running the latest version of the Chrome browser.