Here I Go Again

Be forewarned. Here I go again.

There were a couple of announcements at Google I/O 2014 that I think are more connected than they appear at first.

But to set them up, I've got to backtrack a little.

Remember my previous discussion about platforms?

I wonder if Chrome is the alternative. It's certainly a ways out in the future but it's cloud-based and hardware agnostic.

And then my speculation on removing NPAPI from Chrome?

I believe that this is a deliberate effort on Google's part to remove all the NPAPI extensions from Chrome. This goes beyond security though. This is a platform issue.

Now Google has said that Android apps will run on Chromebooks.

Google will soon allow users to install Android apps on their Chromebooks.

Gosh. How will they do that? They'd need a new runtime platform for their apps.

Bingo!

ART replaces Dalvik as the default compiler for the next Android release.

They'd need this compiler to create system-dependent code.

ART, on the other hand, compiles the intermediate language, Dalvik bytecode, into a system-dependent binary.

Do you see the handwriting on the wall? There are going to be 2 (or more) versions of ART. One that runs on ARM processors and one that runs on x86. Remember that Android and Chrome OS are both built on Linux.

This is the platform convergence that was speculated when Sundar Pichai took over Android.

You heard it here first.