- Google is no longer working on its Ferrochrome launcher, an app that would’ve made running Chrome OS in a virtual machine on select Android devices super easy.
- Google started the Ferrochrome project as a tech demo to demonstrate Android’s improved virtualization capabilities.
- With the removal of the Ferrochrome launcher, it’ll still be possible to run Chrome OS in a VM on Android devices, but it’ll require a lot of manual effort.
The best Android phones of 2024 certainly have the hardware to be considered powerful portable PCs, but most of them lack the software to actually contend with the traditional PC experience. If there were a way to run an OS built for PCs like Chrome OS on them, though, then they might actually be able to serve as PC replacements for many people. Earlier this year, we learned about an app that would make it really easy to run Chrome OS on top of Android, but we’ve now learned that Google is canceling its plans.
Back in May, we exclusively reported that Google was experimenting with running Chrome OS on Android through the use of virtualization. This takes advantage of a relatively new technology in Android called the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF). AVF was introduced in Android 13 as a way to provide a secure and private execution environment for highly sensitive code. Initially, AVF was only designed to execute small workloads in a very barebones build of Android running in an isolated virtual machine, but over the past year, Google has been working on making it capable of running alternative operating systems with full graphical interfaces.