Android Applications

In addition to some of the great tools you can download from the Google Play Store such as IDEs, DB explorers, Web Servers, you can also get Educational applications. This one will probably come in very handy for any parents with kids who have Chromebooks (or not, this also works on phones and tablets). ScratchJr or as some of you might know it as just Scratch. It is one of the best applications I have ever used to learn problem solving and how computers work. This was something they used at school to teach us how to start thinking like a coder and you can get it on your Chromebook.

Linux

Progressive Web App (PWA)

The second browser based IDE we will look at is Google Cloud Shell. This is something tied into Google Cloud and the entire cloud offering from Google. It is again essentially Visual Studio Code but in the browser. You can compile, run and debug the code directly from the Cloud Shell. It works really well and you can directly clone Google Cloud Repositories into the Google Cloud Shell. If you are already using Google Cloud then the steps you need to take to use Cloud Shell are very small.

Conclusion

There are many tools that you can use for coding on a Chromebook. Due to all the available options it can sometimes get confusing. I would suggest using each platform to its strengths for what you need. For example Linux applications are great for offline coding and native Android development. The PWAs are great for quick turn around of projects and they have great integrations with other platforms. Android applications are great at filling in the gaps of all the things that do not exist on the other platforms.