Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google has discontinued development of Ferrochrome Launcher, an app that makes it very easy to run Chrome OS in a virtual machine on certain Android devices.
- Google launched the Ferrochrome project as a technology demo to demonstrate improvements to Android’s virtualization capabilities.
- Even with the Ferrochrome launcher removed, it is still possible to run Chrome OS in a VM on an Android device, but it requires a lot of manual effort.
The best Android smartphones of 2024 certainly have the hardware to be considered powerful portable PCs, but most lack the software to actually compete with a traditional PC experience. But if there was a way to run an OS built for PCs, like Chrome OS, on a PC, it could actually serve as a PC replacement for many people. Earlier this year, we learned about an app that would make it super easy to run Chrome OS on Android, but it turns out Google has canceled that plan.
In May, we exclusively reported that Google was experimenting with running Chrome OS on Android using virtualization. It takes advantage of a relatively new technology in Android called Android Virtualization Framework (AVF). AVF was introduced in Android 13 as a way to provide a secure and private execution environment for sensitive code. Initially, AVF was designed only to run small workloads on very barebones builds of Android running in isolated virtual machines, but over the past year, Google has We’ve been working on being able to run alternative operating systems with graphical interfaces.
When Google chose Chrome OS to demonstrate Android 15’s enhanced virtualization features, there was hope that the company would eventually turn this into a feature that would be included in future versions of Android. Born. Even when Google tells us that its efforts to run Chrome OS on Android are just a fun proof of concept, we can’t help but wonder if its efforts could easily turn Android smartphones (and tablets) into portable Chromebooks. I was hoping it would open.
The reason we were excited is that even though Google called the project a technology demo back in May, it’s not just about developing an app that lets you download and run Chrome OS on Android in one click. That’s because it started in June. To get an exclusive first look at the project in May, to get Chrome OS up and running on my Android smartphone, I had to manually grab a Chrome OS image and configure everything myself. This required manually pushing a number of files to the device and running several scripts to configure the virtual machine.
In contrast, Google’s new app called Ferrochrome launcher automatically downloads, sets up, and launches Chrome OS. The Ferrochrome launcher app handles everything from configuring your virtual machine to running the VM launcher app, which displays the Chrome OS graphical interface.
But unfortunately, Google has decided to shut down the Ferrochrome launcher app. This was recently revealed by code changes submitted to AOSP Gerrit. The code changes have not yet been merged, but will remove the entire Ferrochrome launcher app from AOSP. Google is removing this app because there are no plans to ship the app or maintain the code. Google appears to be moving towards using the Linux-based Debian distribution instead of Chrome OS as a testbed for AVF development.
Mishal Rahman / Android Authority
This decision has minimal impact on users, given that Google has not officially committed to shipping Chrome OS in this manner. Still, I’m sure some people are disappointed that this feature isn’t available, at least in an easily accessible form. Android’s underlying virtualization features are still being improved, so it’s still possible to run Chrome OS in a virtual machine, but you’ll need to make a lot of manual adjustments to get it up and running.
