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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

> One important difference that pretty much wipes out what a lot of us would be interested in: "Google Play and Android apps: Chrome OS Flex does not support Android apps or Google Play."

If they added that, it would kill Chrome OS’s main benefit: security.

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Why would it kill security? Chrome OS already supports Play and Android apps: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7021273?hl=en

Many of ChromeOS's security guarantees evaporate as soon as you install or enable the android subsystem.

I beg to differ on this. Went to a presentation by the ChromeOS engineers who developed the Android support, at LinuxCon 2016(?) in Berlin. Everything shown there pointed to an explicit distrust of Android, their security posture was essentially 'sandbox the hell out of it'.

The Android sandbox on ChromeOS was pretty weak until recently, sharing a kernel with significant attack surface with the underlying chromeos.

Android 11 on ChromeOS is being deployed as a lightweight VM, called ARCVM: https://chromeunboxed.com/how-to-check-your-chromebook-new-a... It’s similar to how the Linux VMs on chromeos work.

Better link: https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/making-android-more-secure-wit...

I wonder if this is related to Flex’s “supported” devices not having verified boot, which is via a chip provided by Google. Some detail at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/ec/+/c....

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