Google has been tweaking Chrome OS for several years, and it brought massive changes and made a lot of improvements in recent years. As a result, the platform is more stable, more powerful, and easier to use than ever. The introduction of Android apps have made it a compelling operating system for many students, and the Linux support also made it more developer-friendly. Google also shared that Android app usage is 50% up year-over-year, which is a big milestone and impressive achievement on such affordable machines.
In a blog post, Google shared that the number of users engaging with Android apps on Chrome OS has increased 50% year-over-year (YoY). Google also shared that Chrome OS has grown 92% in the past year, making it the fastest-growing OS of all time. There are also currently more than 250 million active large-screen devices running Android around the world.
Source: Google
The post mainly recaps what Google has done to improve Android support on Chrome OS over time and how it managed to scale up the number of users and applications supported on the platform. Chrome OS has been growing rapidly in the past few years, and the global pandemic has certainly helped the platform establish a more significant role as it helped students and other people to connect to the internet and get work done during a very difficult time.
Google also mentioned that it’s “Steadily updating all Chromebooks to support Android 11”, and that Chrome OS 93 offers more options to “made-for-mobile” apps using the window management tools. The Nearby Share functionality has also arrived to all apps on Chrome OS devices running Chrome 96 or higher, and it’ll support both Android 9 and Android 11.
Google also mentions that it aims to bring more tools to developers to create more engaging apps next year, and we’ll likely continue seeing more changes in the near future. We’ve also recently heard that Steam might finally be available on Chromebooks soon. What are your thoughts about the new changes and the Android app engagement statistics?