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Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

arstechnica.com

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Re: Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

#11

Post by bwang29 »

This is really going to hurt Windows users who do not want to use .exe or Windows 10 apps, which are both very heavy and less secure when it comes to https or remote content loading compared to Chrome Apps (Windows UWP in this case).

Disclaimer: It's interesting to see that our app (Polarr) is in the screenshot (link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/polarr-photo-edito...)

Although ChromeOS is the smallest platform we currently support, we spent a lot of energy on it and it is so far, still the highest rated photo chrome app.

To put things in perspective. Between September to December, our Chrome App user breakdown are

Windows: 48.05% ChromeOS: 43.38% macOS: 7.11% Amount of users who used the app during this time frame: 326,459 (28.92% new).

Between Jun and September, our user breakdown are

Windows: 56.34% ChromeOS: 34.84% macOS: 7.25% Amount of users who used the app during this time frame: 280,013 (28.52% new).

Re: Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

#12

Post by bsimpson »

bwang29 wrote: post #11

This is really going to hurt Windows users who do not want to use .exe or Windows 10 apps, which are both very heavy and less secure when it comes to https or remote content loading compared to Chrome Apps (Windows UWP in this case). Disclaimer: It's interesting to see that our app (Polarr) is in the screenshot (link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/polarr-photo-edito... ) Although ChromeOS is the smallest…

Have you looked into what it would take to port your app to current web standards? I suspect you can replace the deprecated functionality with wasm and a service worker.

Re: Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

#14

Post by bwang29 »

bsimpson wrote: post #12
bwang29 wrote: post #11

This is really going to hurt Windows users who do not want to use .exe or Windows 10 apps, which are both very heavy and less secure when it comes to https or remote content loading compared to Chrome Apps (Windows UWP in this case). Disclaimer: It's interesting to see that our app (Polarr) is in the screenshot (link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/polarr-photo-edito... ) Although ChromeOS is the smallest…

Have you looked into what it would take to port your app to current web standards? I suspect you can replace the deprecated functionality with wasm and a service worker.

It should be very doable and we do have a self hosted solution at https://photoeditor.polarr.co , which nobody uses as it is buried in terms of SEO (site like this https://www.pizap.com/pizap has much higher page rank). We'd love to keep the app on the web store as the SEO and amount of reviews we built up made us really stand out of the crowd.

Re: Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

#15

Post by finchisko »

I'm using only Vysor and Postman Chrome Apps. So I can probably switch to their Electron variants. But have mixed feeling about Chrome Apps discontinued. On one hand it's good as Chrome Apps were tied just to Chrome/ChromeOS, while web apps should be platform agnostic. On other hand, Chrome apps were much smaller than Electron apps, as Election runtime has not to be included with every app (Chrome was the shared runtime). There is about 2 orders of magnitude size difference (megabytes vs. hundreds of MBs).

Wish we have system level support for Electron apps, so not every single one has to bundle Electron libraries separately.

Edit: There is already project that is targeting that. https://medium.com/dailyjs/put-your-electron-app-on-a-diet-w...

Re: Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

#16

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #9

It seems like I'm the only one who is happy about this. What's the point of restricting apps built using open web standards to one proprietary browser and app store? Agreed that there was a gap in offline support which Chrome filled at the time, but now it's time to move on and use newer and more widely supported APIs.

[deleted]

Re: Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

#18

Post by danirod »

Honestly, I'm all in for PWAs in favour of Chrome Apps. To the final user, a PWA will work the same: an icon and a chrome-less window. However, they are built on top of open standards, so any browser can support PWAs and provide the same experience to their users, unlike Chrome apps, which only were supposed to work in Chrome. I hope that in the transition, we see more and more progressive web applications.

PWAs have replaced a few native apps on my phone and I couldn't be happier about it. I can use Twitter, Telegram, YouTube and even read HN (via the Premii webapp [1]) through a fullscreen interface that behaves like a native application (no address bar, tinted notifications bar, push notifications for Twitter and Telegram), but that nonetheless is still a browser.

Support for PWAs on Firefox for Android is around the corner. I'm a Firefox Nightly user and the support is there: websites that have a webapp manifest display an icon on the address bar to let you quickly "install" the application as an icon to the homescreen. It is supposed to reach stable channel on Firefox 58 [2].

[1]: http://hn.premii.com/ [2]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/24/firefox-58-will-let-...

Re: Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

#19

Post by mephitix »

danirod wrote: post #18

Honestly, I'm all in for PWAs in favour of Chrome Apps. To the final user, a PWA will work the same: an icon and a chrome-less window. However, they are built on top of open standards, so any browser can support PWAs and provide the same experience to their users, unlike Chrome apps, which only were supposed to work in Chrome. I hope that in the transition, we see more and more progressive web applications. PWAs have…

There is virtually no iOS support though. Even though service worker and app manifest are being worked on at the moment in Webkit I think it'll be a while before we see safari/mobile safari updated. I completely agree PWAs are the way forward though.

Re: Chrome Apps are dead, as Google shuts down the Chrome Web Store section

#20

Post by lordfosco »

jacobkg wrote: post #2

I'm really confused about what this means for Chrome Apps on ChromeOS. We use Electron for Windows/Mac/Linux but as far as I know Chrome Apps are still the only game in town for ChromeOS. Is there another way to release apps for Chrome OS?

At this point in time you are probably better off writing Android apps (so mostly Java and some Kotlin) and improving them towards the usual screen ratio (and size) if Chromebook screens.

I am wondering however when Google will actually mark those apps as "chromeOS optimized" (or is that already a thing?) - it really shouldn't be a big deal to find those apps that really shine one Chromebooks.

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