Ionic Target for ChromeOS

Is it possible to deploy Ionic 2 apps to run on Chromebooks (i.e. ChromeOS, e.g. via the Play Store)?

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Interesting, just found this in my research https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-supporting-android-apps

Does anyone have any practical experience with this that they are willing to share with the community?

There an old thread on the chrome dev portal about this.

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/chrome_apps_on_mobile

though, like I said, it is quite old, and look to be a bit out of date.

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I’ve just gone through about two days of struggling with trying to figure out why the Play Console indicates that Chromebooks are not supported devices for my Ionic 2 app. This is not for lack of trying. But alas, I haven’t solved it :-(.

This is definitely not a mark against Ionic, but rather a simple declaration of frustration at the opacity of Google in expressing why my AndroidManifest.xml implies incompatibility with a certain class of devices (or any suggestions as to how I might make my Manifest more permissive / flexible).

So you are trying to build an Android app now that can be deployed on the (few) Chromebooks that also have Play Store?

(My current Chromebook, HP Chromebook 14, unfortunately won’t get the Play Store :confused: )

Yea that was my goal, I’ve got an Asus C100P. I just can’t for the life of me figure out what it takes to get the Play Store to say my app is supported on Chromebook… I’ll come back to it at some point, but for now I need to get on with getting my first release out :-).

I’m not just developing for Android either, I expect to take on deploying for iOS in the near future too, not sure what hurdles I’ll face there, but I figure that’s at least a more common Ionic use case.

My bookmark for this topic: https://developer.android.com/topic/arc/index.html But I’m sure you know that already.

Heh, yes I have read that page multiple times with a fine tooth comb.

It’s been several months - were you eventually able to get Ionic apps working on Chrome OS? We’re also getting a lot of customer demand for this, so I’m about to dive into why the Play Store says it is incompatible…

for everybody still looking, this is how I got my app published on Chromebooks/ChromeOS too.

make sure you have target SDK set to 26+

add https://github.com/dpa99c/cordova-custom-config to your project

now in your config file add this to the widget
tag: xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

now inside your tags add:

<custom-preference delete="true" name="android-manifest/[@android:name='android.hardware.location.gps']" /> <custom-config-file parent="/*" target="AndroidManifest.xml"> <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.location.gps" android:required="false" /> <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.touchscreen" android:required="false" /> <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.type.pc" android:required="false" /> </custom-config-file>

Now remove your platforms folder in your project and run:

ionic cordova platform add android@7.1.3

That’s it!

The reason I use the delete the tag is that I use a geolocation plugin and it keeps adding it to the manifest file, this way it gets deleted again.

I couldn’t get it to work with Cordova android 7.0.0 because of a bug that keeps setting your minsdkversion to 19, it may work for you though.