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Comment by someperson | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody have a way to do Android development on a ARM Chromebooks? The Android SDK is not available on ARM (probably will never be).

I have used AIDE (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl...) to with Github and Dropbox with some success, but I feel it could be a lot more polished - but it works as far as I can tell.

A Chromebook + modern Android smartphone/tablet is powerful enough to provide a very good development environment (no need to emulate a device). It's held back by Eclipse being slow and bloated and Android SDK being unavailable.

Is there any hope for me other than getting a more powerful laptop? I feel like I people around the world should be able to write great Android software with a Chromebook + android device, but they currently can't

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Yeah, with 64-bit ARM chips and 4GB+ RAM devices coming out soon, it's time for Google to prepare an ARMv8-based SDK at least. They wouldn't need to support earlier hardware, since they're not that powerful anyway.

I'm fairly confused why it doesn't come standard on Chromebooks. Google has a vested interest in encouraging Android app development and if dev mode on the Chromebook came with it, I'm sure they'd see a lot more people trying their hand at Android development. On the other hand, if you're already writing Java, you probably have a powerful enough machine to handle it.

I did it, although you probably won't like how.

I ran the Android SDK from a remote VM on EC2. I would edit my files in Vim on there, and run ant to build the APK, and adb install to install it to my locally connected device. I can't remember if I actually forwarded the USB port, or if I established an SSH tunnel to install via "WiFi". Either way, I think they both work.

I was able to do significant amounts of Android development this way. That said, I've switched to an rMBP, and use IntelliJ. The code completion and syntax correction is out of this world. It's definitely better than my old setup.

I picked up the original Samsung Series 5 chromebook for $250 on sale. It gets the same battery life as the new ARM-based model, has a nicer screen (1280 x 800 vs. 1366 x 768 - more vertical real-estate) and is only slightly thicker. Oh, and it has a fan, but it isn't too loud.

There's nothing stopping me from writing Android software on this device since it's x86.

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