When you boot up your Chromebook, it will begin with a warning screen noting that “OS verification is OFF”. You will be prompted with an opportunity to “turn OS verification OFF”. On most Chromebooks, you do so by turning the device off, then holding down the ESC and Refresh keys while you press the Power button. To get to Developer Mode, we need to first reboot into Recovery Mode. The use of Developer Mode may void your Chromebook’s warranty. This could include important data like any files you’ve downloaded, or locally cached passwords. Since ChromeOS is an online-centric operating system, the vast majority of your data will be stored remotely, but make sure you’ve backed up everything important that’s local to your machine before you begin. If you tried out ARC Welder before, let us know in the comment section below which apps or games worked for you.Placing your device into Developer Mode will wipe all data and user information from it. Nevertheless, some app will work just fine, so if you’re patient enough you’ll find some that do. Unfortunately, those who would like to test out games that are frustrating to play on a small smartphone screen, won’t have too much luck to do so. Some did load the first screen, but then crashed afterwards, so this is a hit-and-miss kind of deal. The majority of the games we tried to test didn’t work. Although the animations were a bit slow to load, the overall experience was pretty decent. Some simply crash for inexplicable reasons.įor example, Instagram did not load for us, while Messenger Lite and Twitter worked just fine.
We have to warn you that some of the apps will probably fail to load, as we found out in our testing. Next, press test and wait for the app to load. Like select the orientation, form factor or whether the app should the resized. It will take a few seconds for it to load, but once it does, you’ll need to do a few additional things. Once you’ve downloaded an APK, simply click on the “Add your APK” button to start testing.
We recommend you give a try one of these APK databases which offer a large selection of apps and games:
Find and download APK filesĪRC Welder works with APK files, so in order to get Android apps to run on your PC, you will have to find and download the APK files of the apps you want to get on desktop. Platform-specific bugs exist.” This is a warning that not everything will work smoothly. The tool will highlight that saying that “ You are using ARC Welder on a non-Chrome OS device. However, we need to note that ARC Welder has been specifically designed for Chrome OS. So the extension should work regardless of whether you’re using a Windows laptop or a Macbook. After the short installation process, you should be able to start using Android apps on your desktop.Īll desktop systems are supported including Windows 10, MacOS, and Linux. Open the Chrome browser on your laptop or desktop computer, head on to the Chrome Web Page for ARC Welder and add the extension to your browser.
With that being said, let’s see how you can install the tool.