Android notifications and apps coming to Google’s Chromebooks
"Wouldn't it be nice if you could get some of your fav. Android apps on your Chromebook?"
Android notifications for phone calls and text messages are coming*to Chromebooks, and Android applications will also make their way onto Google's computers, the company announced today.
The notification integration isn't just limited to incoming phone calls and text messages. "My phone was in my pocket and running out of battery and my Chromebook popped up a notification and said, 'your phone is running out of battery,'" Google Senior VP Sundar Pichai said during the Google I/O keynote.
Google also plans to let Android applications run across both phones and Chromebooks. "One thing that struck us is wouldn't it be nice if you could get some of your favorite Android applications, which you love on your phone, on your Chromebook," Pichai said.
Google showed off the Evernote, Vine, and Flipboard Android apps running on a Chromebook.
These features aren't available yet, but will presumably show up in the next version of Android.
To appeal to businesses, Google is also bringing a new data separation feature to Android phones, to keep corporate and personal data separate. This will come in the next Android release but will also be back ported to older devices that run Ice Cream Sandwich and above.*Samsung contributed the code for its Knox security software to the Android open source project to help make this happen.
