Chromebooks are an excellent value, and the number of apps available for them continues to grow. Here, we collect all the best apps for creativity, entertainment, productivity, and more. These days, when you talk about ChromeOS apps, you’re mostly talking about Android apps, since the Chrome Web Store now only offers browser extensions and themes. You can also use progressive web apps (PWAs). Both types appear in your Chromebook’s Launcher and in the Games & Apps panel. PCMag has been testing ChromeOS apps since the OS’s inception in 2011, so you can rely on our recommendations. We don’t include the Google apps that come with your device here, such as Chrome, Google Docs, and Google Photos, which are all excellent. Past our list of top picks, you’ll find more background on the ChromeOS app situation.
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Adobe’s all-in-one, web-based Express design tool lets you create compelling visuals and videos that primarily target social media platforms. The app comes with templates and stock content, as well as Adobe AI smarts, which have the ability to automatically remove backgrounds. It’s available as a web app on ChromeOS. Alternatively, you can visit express.adobe.com to start using this imaging web application. Free users can try most features, but exporting creations that include premium content—which is most of it—requires a subscription of $9.99 per month. A 30-day trial is available.
Adobe Express Review
Adobe Photoshop on the Web
Adobe has gone to great pains to develop a web version of its flagship image editing application, Photoshop. The result is impressive, with an interface that’s more intuitive than the dedicated desktop program. A few Photoshop tools are still missing from this version, but you get most of the impressive new AI-powered tools like Generative Fill and Select Subject. The Photoshop web app has the same subscription price as the full Photoshop program, starting at $22.99 monthly with an annual commitment. A 7-day trial is available.
Adobe Photoshop Review
BandLab is a digital audio workstation featuring a 32-track studio, more than 370 MIDI instruments, and a drum machine. You can record from the app, apply Autopitch, make samples, and use loops. The app supports collaboration if you’re not into creating music yourself. You can do a lot with a free BandLab account, but a $14.95-per-month membership unlocks advanced features and gives you more exposure in the app’s music sharing and publishing community. It’s available for ChromeOS via the Google Play Store.
Advanced video editing typically requires a high-powered machine, but LumaFusion (which carries a one-time price of $29.99 on the Google Play Store) can help you with more than just simple joining, trimming, and splitting tasks on your Chromebook. It allows up to six video tracks and six audio tracks. You can link other online storage services to import media files, including Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. LumaFusion also supports animated title presets, audio ducking, keyframing effects, linkable clips, a magnetic timeline, a picture-in-picture effect, and transitions. One downside is that outputting video projects takes a relatively long time.
A Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription gets you access to the unbeatable Excel, PowerPoint, and Word apps, along with the Copilot AI chatbot. This ChromeOS web app serves as a hub for the productivity suite. Sure, you could try the Google equivalents, but they aren’t as enjoyable or as advanced. Google and Microsoft have even implemented capabilities that make Office on Chromebooks appealing to enterprises, including support for the Frontier program. You can use the web version of Microsoft 365 for free, but you get just 5GB of online storage. A $99.99-per-year personal account increases the storage allotment to 1TB and includes other benefits.
Microsoft 365 Review
Microsoft Copilot for ChromeOS
Entering the world of generative AI is possible on your Chromebook since you can install the Microsoft Copilot Android app. It lets you research practically anything, providing succinct answers that would otherwise take a lot of searching and reading to find. Copilot can also generate emails, images, letters, programming code, recipes, and tables using OpenAI’s leading AI models. You can upload images for analysis and carry on conversations with a choice of realistic AI voices. Signing into an account allows for longer conversations and lets you save your chat history. Though Google continues to add Gemini capabilities to ChromeOS, you can set Copilot as your Chromebook’s default AI if you want.
Understandably, you can’t uninstall Google Chrome from a Chromebook. However, you can install Firefox for free from the Google Play Store to access additional privacy features. It’s even possible to set it as your default web browser, though ChromeOS will continue to open links inside Chrome or web apps regardless. Firefox blocks web trackers by default, includes password management features, and gives you a lot of customization options, such as a dark mode and a reading mode.
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Spotify remains one of the most comprehensive music and podcast streaming services around. It boasts one of the largest music libraries and offers excellent listening suggestions, as well as social tools. For instance, you can see what your friends are playing if they share their info, and its automatic playlists are a highlight. When you visit Spotify’s download page, the Chromebook link directs you to the web version of the app, but the sleeker Android app is the better option. A free, ad-supported Spotify account doesn’t let you download music or choose any song to play on demand. The $11.99-per-month Premium account removes those restrictions and supports better audio quality.
Spotify Review
Proton VPN
Proton VPN is the best free VPN we’ve tested. It has a healthy helping of features, offers a great selection of servers worldwide, and performed well in our speed tests. Proton VPN can protect you from nefarious sites and eavesdroppers on public Wi-Fi networks. It can also unblock some geo-restricted streaming content. The best and only option for Chromebooks is the Android app from the Google Play Store. A full subscription costs between $4.49 and $9.99 per month, depending on the subscription length.
Proton VPN Review
There’s a reason Netflix is the biggest video streaming service in the world—it always has something to please your couch potato palate. Aside from accessing Netflix via the web, you can download its app from the Google Play Store. It features a clear, simplified interface that’s appropriate for touch-screen Chromebooks and can notify you about the series you follow. If you can endure a few commercials, Netflix costs $7.99 per month with ads. The top-end plan, which now supports 4K streaming, costs a steep $24.99 per month and allows for four simultaneous streams.
Netflix Review
I find using WhatsApp on my PC convenient because it saves me the trouble of checking my phone for a quick reply. The cross-platform, end-to-end encrypted messaging app is the most popular worldwide. In other words, there’s a good chance that you have contacts who use it. It’s especially useful if you travel outside the US, where it’s ubiquitous. It’s also totally free. To use it, simply head to the web platform or download the more full-featured version from the Google Play store.
WhatsApp Review
VLC Media Player usually makes the top apps list on every platform, both mobile and desktop. And why not? It’s free and can play just about any media format you throw at it—AVI, AAC, FLAC, M2TS, MKV, MOV, MP4, Ogg, TS, and Wv, just to name a few. Note, however, that the Android version of VLC can’t transcode files to different formats the way the desktop versions can. The app is completely free, though the organization behind it accepts donations.
A Chromebook will suit you fine if you just want to read—or write. Wattpad bills itself as “the world’s largest storytelling community.” It serves as a clearinghouse for both readers and writers. Once you download the Android app, you can choose from more than 20 categories for your reading pleasure, including Fantasy, Romance, and Science Fiction. Reading is free, but you must spend Wattpad Coins to finish some books. Writers can specify their target audience and upload a cover image. If your story makes it into the Wattpad Originals collection, you have the chance to make money. A tip: Set the reading preference to Landscape; otherwise, you’ll get a narrow mobile view. Subscribing to the platform ($4.99 or $7.99 per month, depending on the plan) removes ads and gets you bonus coins.
Chrome Apps vs. Android Apps
When they first launched, Chromebooks could run only the Chrome web browser and web apps from the Chrome Web Store. Google subsequently added the ability to run Android apps as long as their developers adapted them for use on the bigger Chromebook screens. The Chrome Web Store no longer has a section for Chromebook apps, per se, but you can turn many app-like websites into Chromebook apps. In fact, the Games & Apps button in the middle of the shelf can be used to find both Android apps and PWAs for you and direct you to the correct installation route.
Note that when running ChromeOS Flex from a USB drive or by installing it on an older PC or Mac, you will only have the option to use web apps that run in the Chrome browser. ChromeOS Flex doesn’t support Android apps or the Google Play Store. It does, however, give businesses a way to stream their custom apps using Cameyo.
Android apps have improved on ChromeOS, and, helpfully, only compatible ones appear in the Google Play Store on your Chromebook. One tip: When using Android apps on your Chromebook, we recommend selecting the Resizable option from the top-center sizing choices, unless you’re a rare Chromebook tablet user.
What Are Chrome Web Apps?
The Chrome Web Store now just has Extensions and Themes. You might view extensions as apps, but they’re not apps in important ways. Extensions can usually access all your web activity in the browser you install them in, whereas PWAs are simply websites that act like apps.
(Credit: Google/PCMag)
PWAs can have more power than normal websites, such as the ability to work offline. You can also install and uninstall many at the operating system level. In the absence of a dedicated section on the Chrome Web Store, the best way to install them is to simply go to the web app’s site and choose “Install [site name]“ from the address bar. But, as mentioned, you can also find them from the Games & Apps panel. (Google sometimes refers to this as the App Mall.)
For some websites, a button appears in the browser’s address bar labeled Open in App. It opens the installed version of an application, whether you installed it as an Android app from Google Play or a web app from the browser address bar. Either way, the apps get a button on your Launcher. One cool thing about using the Google Play Store is that you can remotely install apps on your Chromebook from any web browser you’re logged into with your Google account (something Apple has never managed to offer with its App Store).
How to Run Linux Apps on Your Chromebook
As if the choice between web apps and Android apps wasn’t enough, there’s a third, though not quite so user-friendly, option: use ChromeOS’s built-in Linux support, which sometimes goes by the evocative name Crostini.
(Credit: Canonical/Whitson Gordon)
To install it, click the clock in the bottom-right corner and click the Settings cog. Open About ChromeOS > Developers, then click Set Up next to Linux Development Environment. ChromeOS then downloads the necessary files and sets up your Linux container. You can set up your Chromebook to dual-boot ChromeOS and Linux. After you have Linux running on your computer, you can access a large library of native Linux applications.
The only issue with this setup is that most people choose ChromeOS for its simplicity, and running Linux on a Chromebook necessitates using the more complicated command-line interface. The capability exists primarily to aid developers. For the full rundown, see how to install Linux on your Chromebook.
