How would that work? What would it be like? Android is powered by native apps, Chrome by cloud apps. Chrome already runs on Android. They have different approaches and I don't see how they how they could form a coherent whole or how one would benefit from a merger with the other. :/
Move Native Client for ARM into Chrome on Android (or, wait until PNaCl is ready, and move that into Chrome for Android).
Focus effort on exposing functionality currently available to native Android apps through web APIs in Chrome to make Chrome apps (using NaCl/PNaCl where that kind of performance is needed), rather than Dalvik ones, the preferred mechanism for delivering apps on Android.
At that point, Android and ChromeOS are pretty much the same thing.
Thanks for your input. Now I can see how that would fuse the systems and how that would make for better web apps that had the strengths of native apps (Something like Firefox OS I figure).
But would that improve the Android platform? I'm wondering if it would be confusing or complicated for users, getting some apps from play and other from the Chrome store. Having apps in the launcher and some other apps you have to run from Chrome. Although at that point Google could merge the Chrome store and Google Play and have shortcuts for Chrome apps that launch a chrome-less browser to look native. Now that I've though about it I think it could work rather well, but I'm still wondering what would be the benefit for the users of Android.
Edit: Now that I've seen vibrunazo's comment I think I get it. If Google build a web programming api that is the same as Android's programming for one is programming for the other. I think that would be truly awesome indeed, I enjoy developing for android, not so much for web.
Good point. Android is ahead of Web apis, and Google have been adding android apis to the Web for a while (example intents). They just need to keep doing that until there's 1:1 feature parity, so we can develop apps for either one or the other as if they were the same. And the same apps would work predictably on both.
> Android is powered by native apps, Chrome by cloud apps.
Android is powered by Java apps (mostly). Java apps run in a virtual machine, just like web apps. Java apps are no more native than Chrome packaged apps.
