Google’s Android, the most widely used operating system in the world, is going to be getting some more firepower. Into 2017 Google plans to roll key elements and features of its Chrome OS into the system, creating one platform for app developers and hardware makers to focus on building products.

Google’s aim is clearly to get Android running on as many devices as possible, it is already powering phones, tablets, watches, TVs, and car infotainment systems. Chromebooks, their relatively cheaper personal computers powered by the Chrome OS, account for less than 3% of personal computers. So making this shift isn't a seismic change that affects too many current users of the hardware, and it provides a new vertical for Android to grow into.

App development for Chrome OS was always lacking, as Google’s team didn’t dedicate resources in recent years to keep pushing the project forward. Only recently did they open Chrome OS up to supporting ported Android apps. 3rd party app developers didn’t have a lot of incentive to develop for Chrome OS with such a small market-share, and instead dedicated their time to Android.

Bringing the Google Play store to PCs opens an entirely new market for developers. A signal eco-system will allow developers to write an app once and know it can deployed across all devices without incurring significant development overhead and rewriting.

The move also could help Google and independent developers further break into the business world. One of the biggest successes of Apple’s iOS is the litany of workplace, financial, and productivity apps available for the iPad and Mac OS-powered Macbook. Many of these same type of apps exist for Android, and with cross-compatibility from a tablet to a laptop to a phone on the go, this could incentivize small businesses to make a more cost-friendly choice in hardware.

As with everything, Google especially, time will tell. But for now, rejoice that the confusing moniker of having a browser and an operating system both named "Chrome," long confusing public school teachers whose classrooms received Chromebooks as part of grants, is going the way of the dodo. The expected launch date for the first of these new Android powered PCs will be sometime in 2017, though preview builds are rumored to be coming as early as Q1 in 2016.

As much as some things change, other things tend to remain the same. Things like the need for project methodology, setting standards, and controlling how development occurs are as important today as they have always been.

In a recent eGuide, authored jointly by ComputerWorld, CIO, and InfoWorld, posted on ComputerWorld and entitled “Enterprise Mobile App Development”, it struck me when reading it that the kinds of systems and applications that we build continues to grow and change at a frantic pace, but the underlying keys to successfully developing and deploying these new applications remains the same.

Here’s a few excerpts that point this out.

Methodology:
Spotlight Ticket Management, for instance, follows the agile methodology, which the company had been using before its mobile development transition. “We’re big be-lievers in Scrum and just getting things down quickly and getting iterations out,” Knopp says. (Scrum is a framework for team collaboration on software projects.) Dave Peters, VA assistant deputy CIO for enterprise soft-ware development, also noted that apps need to be de-signed in an iterative fashion. The key is to involve users. In the VA’s case, Peters says the department needs to practice both continuous integration—an approach that’s been around for about 20 years—and continuous deployment/DevOps “to decrease our time to market and enable more frequent and timely end user and customer feedback.”

Setting Standards:
In addition, Baker believes an enterprise mobility group should specify a standard data access mechanism through which mobile apps can tap legacy systems. In-stead of building multiple interfaces to legacy systems, Baker recommends building a mapping layer on top of the legacy systems. The idea, he explains, is to create a layer that “knows how to access data from legacy sys-tems and make [data] available to the mobile device in a standard way.” A central data access point is just another way of imposing some order on the mobile app trend.

Discipline:
“We need to encourage people to do interesting and innovative things with app development but, at the same time, keep control of the data and the brand,” Baker says.

Just a couple of examples of why I felt a lot of “deja vu all over again” as I read the article. Check it out and see if you get the same feeling…..

Yes, these are the new Mobile Apps we’re talking about, but they are still Apps, and all the things we’ve learned about how to build Apps the right way still apply.