Chromebook apps?

[J. Landman Gay]

I've had fairly good experiences running an Android app on Chromebook. The manufacturer 
matters. On my Lenovo there are a few glitches, on my client's Asus Flip there are a few 
different glitches, but in general they are minor. I've made two Android apps that also run on 
Chromebooks.

Both apps are limited to portrait mode only and that works very well as long as you don't flip 
the device between desktop and tablet. Whatever mode you open the app with, stay there. In 
desktop mode, the window appears at approximately the same size as the stack; in tablet mode 
(using fullscreenMode "showAll") it resizes beautifully and looks gorgeous. My client actually 
did demos at an educational conference with her Chromebook in tablet mode and was well 
received. But if you launch in tablet mode and then flip to desktop mode, the window resizes 
oddly. The same thing happens if you do it in reverse. LC isn't aware of the change, it's 
probably the same reason you can't change the desktop resolution on a PC in the middle of a 
session.

While my Lenovo performs as above, the Asus will sometimes crash the app if you switch device 
modes. Other manufacturers may behave differently.

I can't recall offhand what the other glitches were but they were minor and what happened on 
one Chromebook didn't happen on the other. If I remember right, some were visual artifacts that 
appeared on one Chromebook only. We do have a few students running one of the apps on 
Chromebooks (models unknown) and we haven't had any complaints.

Both our test Chromebooks have only 4 GB of RAM and I haven't noticed any slowness. But if you 
do, close down other apps and you should be fine. I suppose it would also depend on what your 
app is trying to do and how much RAM it takes. We're downloading some fairly sizeable images on 
demand and haven't had any trouble.

Internet connections work flawlessly (we do heavy server interactions) and LC in general 
functions as you'd expect. One thing to keep in mind is that you must build with 32-bit 
enabled, as the Android emulator on a Chromebook is only 32-bit. If you build with 64-bit only, 
the app will not launch. I always tick both checkboxes.

I'm sure there are some LC features that won't work but so far everything our apps do is 
working. As long as the dictionary says the command is Android compatible it seems to be okay.

BTW, I'm starting to love my Chromebook, it's an amazing device. Fast, extremely secure, and 
very reliable. I've starting doing almost everything on it except LC development. Installing 
and learning Linux is more than I want to do right now, but I'm thinking LC would work fine if 
I ever got that far.

I think you should go ahead and try it, you might be surprised. ChromeOS has come a long way in 
a very short time, and it gets better with every 6-week update.


On 6/22/20 2:12 PM, William de Smet via use-livecode wrote:
> I am a longtime user of Chromebooks in education and most 'cheap'
> Chromebooks' come with only 4 GB RAM.
> The Chrome browser itself uses a lot of RAM already and my experience with
> Android apps on Chromebooks is that they are slow (lack of available RAM)
> or sometimes not fully functional/compatible.


-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com