Google is working toward bringing Chrome OS, for computers and Android, closer together and its first step is to release apps from Android on Chrome OS.
The four new apps include Duolingo, a language education app; Sight Words, a children's education app; Evernote, a productivity app; and Vine, a video-sharing app.
"These first apps are the result of a project called the App Runtime for Chrome (Beta), which we announced earlier this summer at Google I/O," said Googlers Ken Mixter and Josh Woodward in a blog post, adding Google will be working with a select group of Android developers to bring apps to Chromebooks.
While Google is aiming to break down barriers between the two operating systems, it will be a difficult task to completely bring the two together. For example, some Chromebooks have touch screens while others do not. This will make it difficult for apps to support all types of systems.
For now, the goal is to create "a more seamless experience" for those who use both Chromebooks and Android devices. Google is also asking users to submit suggestions for apps that they would like to see ported over.
"The app code is all running on top of the Chrome platform, specifically inside of Native Client. In this way, the ARC (App Runtime for Chrome) apps run in the same environment as other apps you can download from the Chrome Web Store, even though they are written on top of standard Android APIs," continued the blog post. "The developers do not need to port or modify their code, though they often choose to improve it to work well with the Chromebook form factor (keyboard, touchpad, optional touchscreen, etc)."
Over the past few months, Google has been working hard to enable more offline features in Chrome, including offline document editing, a feature that is welcome to many users. Google also extended support for Chrome OS to five years, over the four years that it previously offered.
Google has also been adding features to Chrome for Android, with a new feature now showing users answers to questions as they type them.
The feature will display answers in the form of cards as questions are being typed and is an experimental feature that can be enabled in Chrome for Android by typing "chrome://flags" in a new tab, and selecting "enabled."
The first four Android apps for Chrome OS are available on the Chrome Web Store for download now.
