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Google says Chrome OS 80 will bring easier Android app sideloading for developers
Google is making it easier in Chrome OS 80 for developers to sideload Android apps. For the first time, you'll be able to sideload without Developer Mode.
Last week at the Android Dev Summit, Google announced a feature that Chrome OS enthusiasts have wanted for years: the ability to sideload Android apps without enabling Developer Mode. We've seen code commits in the past that would have enabled this feature, but none of those implementations ever made their way to the stable channel. Now that Google has officially confirmed this feature will arrive in Chrome OS 80, which is set for a stable release in the second week of February 2020, we no longer need to religiously monitor the Chromium Gerrit for this feature addition.
Google quantifies how much faster Android 10's new Share menu really is
Google says that Android 10's new Share menu is faster, but how much has it really improved? Google finally revealed the numbers.
The Share menu is one of Android's best features, but for years, it's been plagued by a design that's just plain slow. The problem with Android's clunky share menu stemmed from Android 6 Marshmallow when Google introduced Direct Share, a feature that allows users to directly share content to the relevant part of an app. When a user shares any item in an older Android version, the system starts building a list of shareable targets on-demand. If the user has hundreds of apps installed, many of which may have applicable direct share targets, then the loading speed of the share menu could suffer. Thankfully, Android 10 replaces Direct Share with the new Sharing Shortcuts API and deranks apps in the Share menu that still use the older APIs. The new API lets apps publish their direct share targets in advance, so the share menu no longer has to reactively pull share targets. As a result, when the user goes to share any item in Android 10, the share sheet should appear much faster than before.