One of the main appeals of a Chromebook is its simplicity: You’ve essentially just got a row of browser tabs, running web apps, with minimal background activity going on and everything instantly saved and synced to the cloud.
As Chromebooks have developed though, they’ve add more to this basic Chrome foundation. They can run Android apps now, for example, and they actually come with several pre-installed apps that are genuinely useful. Open up the Launcher (the Google icon, bottom left), to see what’s available.
These are the best built-in apps you get right now, if you buy a new Chromebook Plus model—that’s the slightly higher spec series, capable of supporting all the Gemini AI extras that Google has been pushing out in recent years.
Recorder
Recorder offers simple recordings and transcriptions.
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This is perhaps my favorite of the built-in ChromeOS apps. It’s a powerful voice recorder and transcription tool, similar to Recorder on Pixel phones, and it’s really simple to use: Click the record button, start speaking, and you’re up and running.
You’ll need to download a couple of extra AI models to your Chromebook, but once you do, you can have speech transcribed into text immediately, and get AI-powered summaries and titles for your clips too.
What’s more, the app will identify different speakers if you want it to, and apply the correct labels based on voice speech patterns and style. All of your recordings can be easily accessed within the app, and shared elsewhere as and when needed.
Screencast
Screencast lets you save and share screen recordings.
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Screencast is a great tool for screen recording, and you can opt to include your webcam video and microphone audio as needed too. Whatever you’re needing to share from your Chromebook display, Screencast enables you to do it.
Recording is straightforward, and handled via icons on the shelf at the bottom of the interface—there are annotation tools here too, if you need to draw on the screen. When you’re done, any speech is automatically transcribed for you.
There are even some basic editing tools included here, so you can trim out unnecessary portions of your presentation or tutorial (or whatever it is). You can share your screencasts with others via customized links, as well.
Text
Text is a basic text editor and works offline.
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You don’t always necessarily want to create an entire Google Doc or even a Google Keep note to jot ideas down, and that’s where Text comes in: It’s a basic, local text editor, the equivalent of Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on macOS.
There are a few handy features here, behind the plain interface. You get syntax highlighting for a variety of programming languages, configurable font and tab sizes, and a simple search function. You’ve also got light and dark modes to choose from.
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Importantly, it can work completely offline, so it’s ideal for distraction-free writing or coding when you don’t want to have a dozen browser tabs open (or if you lose a wifi signal and need to remember something quickly).
Key Shortcuts
Key Shortcuts lets you edit keyboard shortcuts as well as view them.
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Keyboard shortcuts are among the best productivity hacks for getting more done in a shorter space of time, and Key Shortcuts lets you view all of the shortcuts available on ChromeOS—from opening notifications to changing the screen zoom.
This app is more than just a list of shortcuts, though: You can actually customize many of the shortcuts yourself, via the pencil icon that appears on the right as you hover the cursor. Don’t like the full-screen screenshot shortcut? Change it.
You will be limited in terms of certain keypresses, and the dedicated keys (for volume, for example) that are available on your particular Chromebook model, but Key Shortcuts gives you plenty of flexibility as well as being a handy reference.
Gallery
Gallery lets you work with images, video, audio, and PDFs.
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Last but definitely not least, we have the excellent Gallery app. This is where you can edit images and PDFs, watch videos, and listen to audio. Each of the different components is relatively basic, but they all work well, and all work offline too.
With the image editor, for example, you can crop, rotate, and resize pictures, as well as annotate them with a variety of pen sizes, styles, and colors. There are also basic adjustments available for exposure, contrast, and saturation.
The PDF editor covers some of the main operations you might want to carry out on documents like these: Adding text, annotating pages, and inserting your signature. You can also get AI summaries of PDF documents.
