Finally…
After about a year of waiting for Android Apps on my ThinkPad Chromebook 13 they finally arrived in last night’s update. I was overly excited because just earlier that day I had been on the ‘chat’ with Lenovo asking when this would happen. The answer that I had been given at noon was that the sales team did not know when they would be enabling the feature, but then that evening poof Android apps.
For those on a random search here’s the software setup that I currently have on the ThinkPad Chromebook 13:
- It is in developer mode
- It is on the latest stable build (62.X)
- I have not done any funky changes to manually enable the Playstore
- I do have Chromebrew installed
- I do not have Crouton installed
The ThinkPad Chromebook 13 is my daily driver for web coding and general computer needs, so I tend to take a more conserative approach to modifying the underlying OS, etc. Honestly, if I had Android apps before I probably would have not even put the machine into devloper mode as the main use of this was for git. After checking out the Android Apps on Chrome for half a day, my initial impression is that ‘most’ work and only a few are flaky.
I’ll post a full review of my impressions over the past year of the ThinkPad Chromebook 13 here in the comming weeks, but for now I am just excited to have Android Apps accessible on the machine.
Links to the other posts in the Chromebook series
- Android Apps arrive on ThinkPad Chromebook 13
- Running Hugo on Chromebook
- Thinkpad Chromebook a year later
- Resetting My Chromebook Back to Stock
- Hugo + gulp = Chromebook awesomeness
- Running Tmux for Termux on a Chromebook
- Hugo + SHH - gulp = a new workflow
- Hugo and droppy, Chromebook friends
- 3D Printing from a Chromebook
- Monoprice Mini Delta
- 3D Printing with Astroprint
- Scaling woes with 3D Printing
- Maxing out the Mini Delta 3D printer