Android Apps support may never come to Acer Chromebase 24, Chromebook 11, 15, & others despite Google’s promise

Chromebooks were greatly misunderstood computers when they first debuted but today, they are far more appealing to a large demographic as they seem to solve one of today’s biggest problems.

See, we live in an increasingly connected world and most of our computing already takes place on the cloud. This defeats the purpose of having crazy powerful rigs, only to ever use the browser. Completely overkill.

Chromebooks are, for the most part, cheap computers with mid to low-end specs that run a lightweight Chrome OS which is essentially the popular Google Chrome browser with access to the Chrome extensions from the Web Store.

For most online tasks, this makes so much sense as the modest hardware is optimized to run Chrome OS efficiently. This, however, limits the prospects of this whole setup for users in need of a little more functionality.

In line with that, we saw plans by Google to bring Android apps to Chrome OS. This brought with it hopes for a more functional operating system with enough apps to rival macOS and even Windows by leveraging the power of Android.

An extensive list of Chromebooks that were set to get support for Android apps was released and among them was the Acer Chromebook 11 from back in 2016.

Unfortunately, the Acer Chromebook 11 is yet to get the update that is set to bring with it support for Android apps.

The official Chromium listing of its device still shows that the Android apps support update is still planned for. However, users are not as optimistic about this.

Honestly, if it’s still planned after this long it’s not coming, especially to a device that’s going EOL in September of this year. It’s a shame, but it’s been 5 years.
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At the time of writing, it is still unclear when exactly, or whether the Chromebook 11 will get the much-awaited update at all, even as the end draws ever so near.

The same fate seems to befall a few other Asus Chrome OS devices whose end-of-life updates are also slated for sometime later this year. These include:

– Chromebook 11 (C730 / CB3-111 / C730E / CB3-131) – EoL slated for September 2021
– Chromebook 15 (CB3-531) – EoL slated for September 2021
– Chromebox CXI2 – EoL slated for June 2021
– Chromebase 24 – EoL slated for June 2021.
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For now, users of the Acer Chromebook 11 continue to tinker with their devices with the hopes of forcing Play Store compatibility on the said units.

I still have an 11 on me, and that’s been Planned for almost 5 years. I used GalliumOS on it too. I hope there is a way to force play store compatibility :(.

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It is still not immediately apparent what the hold up is on Google’s end when it comes to pushing out this update to these aging devices. That said, we shall continue to keep an eye on this and update as and when we get more info so stay tuned to PiunikaWeb.

NOTE: We have these and many more Chromebook stories in our dedicated Google section.

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