The laptop was shared amongst multiple Google users. In the past, I once defined a VPN on a Chromebook and forgot to check the box to share the definition. I was told by Google that VPN connections made on the Chrome OS side should be visible to Android apps.

This strikes me as data leakage waiting to happen, so its hard to recommend Android VPNs on a Chromebook. To be doubly sure, I asked Google, and was told that yes, VPN connections made on the Android side are only visible to Android apps. I verified this was true using the TunnelBear Android app.Īs you can see above, we are warned ahead of time that 'This is an experimental feature and it does not currently handle traffic for all apps.'Īfter making the VPN connection, a visit to one of the many websites that displays your public IP address (, IP Chicken, /what-is-my-ip.php) showed that Firefox on Android was connected through the TunnelBear VPN while the native Chrome browser was not. I had read somewhere that VPN connections made from the Android side are seen by other Android apps, but are not seen on the Chrome OS side. So, how does this hybrid system deal with VPNs? A VPN connection typically lives in the fish bowl of an operating system (some live within a web browser). It's interesting, because the Chromebook is now running two operating systems, Chrome OS and Android. The most interesting aspect of Android on Chrome OS, to me, is VPNs. On a Chromebook with multiple Google accounts, one can be using Android apps, while another is not. The installation of Android is tied to a Google account. Even my Google Nexus tablet, also running Android 6.0.1, is missing the September patches. The bad news is that I own a number of Android devices, running version 4, 5 and 6, and the only way I can get bug fixes is to use a Chromebook.

The Android subsystem (is that the right term?) is version 6.0.1 (above) at a Security Patch Level of Sept 5, 2016. Long pressing on a box lets you delete it, I could not figure out how to delete these boxes with the mouse. The only thing that stumped me was the default Firefox home page which displays big boxes for websites that I do not use.

Almost everything I tried in Android (granted, I didn't do all that much) could be done with the mouse. I purchased a touchscreen Chromebook specifically to experience Android, and it turns out that a touchscreen may not really be necessary.

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