Of course, there are a few limitations that will be familiar to anyone who's used emulators for any length of time in the past. You can find these instructions in greater detail on Google's Android Developer page.

Finally, you'll need to sign into a Google account (not necessarily your own) to actually run Android apps on the emulator. Once they're finished installing, use the AVD Manager to create a virtual Pixelbook.Ĭonsider increasing the RAM available to the virtual machine to 2GB, and ensure hardware virtualization support is enabled on your machine to maximise performance. Then, install the Chrome OS SDK by visiting Tools > SDK Manager > SDK Update Sites and pasting the URLs below:

First, you'll need to download and install Android Studio, which is a 750 to 850MB download depending on platform - it's available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Getting started with Chrome OS emulation is pretty straightforward. Given the impressive sales numbers of Chromebooks, particularly in the budget side of the market and in the education industry, it makes sense to ensure that Android apps will run cleanly on Chrome OS. Google has also added a lot of new features to the OS recently, so this could be a good time to start featuring Chrome OS more heavily in your development plans. That means developers can now test how Android apps will run on Chrome OS, without needing to have physical access to a Chromebook themselves.

Now we're looking at things from another angle, as Google have added a Chrome OS emulator to Android Studio. Last week, we covered the exciting news that Google had added Linux app support to Chrome OS, allowing apps like Android Studio to run on Chromebooks.

Android studio ide for chrome os