Which Android apps work on Chrome with ARC Welder right now?

5 min readApr 5, 2015

Platform agnosticism is a big deal to me. I hop across computers all the time. I want to be able to suggest things to my friends and for clients/visitors/customers no matter what platforms they use.

So I found it pretty exciting when I heard that Google was releasing ARC Welder, a tool that enables Android apps to run in Chrome. Basically just like magic. All you need is an APK file.

While this is no doubt one more step for Google to expand their Android ecosystem for profit and user tracking, I’m keen to continue to consent, because their technologies are so helpful and attainable.

I suspect even the most hardcore Apple fan uses Google’s stuff on a daily basis, and most of the hardcore Linux — DuckDuckGo guys are still big fans of the Goog. Even Microsoft has come to realize that they need to be building tools where the people are — and increasingly that isn’t Windows. So to be able to use Android apps on a desktop machine is kind of a big deal. Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS… you name it.

The 3–5 year goal for this is surely to have a much more fluid experience across mobile and desktop, especially for Android users (and while it’s kind of a competitive move, I don’t really see any negatives for iPhone users.) I can imagine a not-too-distant day where Chrome’s Google Now desktop feature also doubles as a notification bar, and texts can be sent over the internet much like Apple allows its iMessage users to do. And I get that installing some of these apps on a desktop kinda defeats the purpose of their mobile nature, but hey, laptops are portable and have cameras and keyboards and [sometimes touch] screens and really aren’t all that much different, ya know?

Right now, the ARC Welder is squarely aimed at developers, and probably more will be spoken of the future of this program at Google IO in a couple month’s time. And there are some up-front negatives: you have to supply your own APK (Android app files, basically), which means they won’t be automatically updated, and also means they aren’t specifically designed for mouse/keyboard input, so they’re going to be a little clunky. They also can’t be resized like a responsive web app, so Microsoft is a little ahead of the game with their Universal Apps in this respect. But the real kicker is that Google Play Services is not fully enabled, so that hampers the connectivity of most of them right now.

But all that understood, it’s pretty darn simple to package any app you have on your Android phone into an APK and load it into the ARC Welder. I used the ARChron Package Manager and it was a cinch.

So here are a few apps I tried out.

HoloCalc — I don’t know why all calculator apps aren’t like this, with a scrolling history of calculations. It’s also quite nice to look at. As the first app I tried, I’m happy to report it works just fine and loaded up quickly, but with one big caveat: no keyboard support. Bummer. The scrolling list, however, responds to two-finger scrolling on Mac, which is great.

Instagram is a hell of a lot more functional than the website has ever been, with 2-finger scrolling, webcam access, the whole nine yards. Posting seemed to work just fine, the feed loaded without any issue… even linking a Facebook account worked. I will probably actually use this. Pretty incredible. [Upon further testing, you can even use the OS-level file picker instead of the webcam, but it seems to crash upon selection — my pictures may have been too large though.]

Pro Tip — if you install an app you like as a Chrome extension, you can add more than one at a time, and they will remember your login data and you can keep it in your dock or taskbar. See the tutorial here.

Twitter works super good and the file picker did work correctly, too. Twitter also seems to work perfectly with the Notification Manager that I thought would be some futuristic thing when I typed it about 8 paragraphs earlier. Wow. [One downside: keyboard input doesn’t recognize certain strokes like Cmd+A to select all text. I have yet to try with a Windows keyboard…]