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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

#51

Post by smt88 »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #31
nindalf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this, but I would prefer if there was a mechanism to keep offline backups. Currently if I lose my phone I am frozen out of my accounts. 1-time codes do exist but they have issues - either they're very easily accessible in the form of a printed paper or they're very difficult to access like an encrypted backup in the cloud. I don't have a good solution to this problem - I am mugged while travel…

What is 2FA? It's 'something you have'. It's not 'one single thing on one device only'. It's just 'something you have'. 'Something you have' relies on physical security, so if you have the same physical security for both your laptop and phone, there's no reduction by having a 2FA token on each device.

That's only true if there's a physical barrier to propagating your tokens to new devices.

The concern is that Authy changes the second factor from physical security back to something cloud-based and hackable.

I don't know if that's legit because I don't know how Authy works.

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

#52

Post by martin_drapeau »

PWAs are pretty cool. However when 60% of your users are on iOS, its not worth the investment until Apple supports them. That won’t happen because it would compete agaisnt native apps. Apple purposely blocks web apps from existing on iOS. Installed Web apps use an old WebView with less HTML5 features than Safari. Your web app is fast on Safari, but slow once installed.

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

#53

Post by chrismorgan »

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.

It is nonetheless interesting that Google have killed this off some time before a complete replacement is ready. It reminds me (to a slightly reduced extent) of how Google Gears was killed off completely before an alternative for its offline support existed—it was four years before service workers fixed that. Still, removing such things early has helped people adopt the standardised form rather than continuing with a Google-specific thing, so as a Firefox proponent I’m glad they did it this way each time, however little sense it seems to make from Google’s and the user’s perspective (seriously, they actively removed offline support from Gmail—and they still haven’t reintroduced it).

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

#54

Post by pjmlp »

seanwilson wrote: post #47
icebraining wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, you can have all those advantages with Qt/QML, since it uses JavaScript and runs on desktop, mobile and even web. That said, I never used it. Another alternative would be React-Native, now that react-native-web exists...

How popular is it? If it's not popular, is there a reason? I often see comments mentioning QT and Java as alternatives to Electron for cross platform apps but my impression is an order of magnitude more developers/companies side with and see the advantages of Electron instead.

Many companies outside IT see software development as a cost center, ideally outsourced somewhere, not as something where UI/UX matters.

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

#55

Post by Klathmon »

mephitix wrote: post #19
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.

There is actually "negative" support in iOS.

You can add a website to your homescreen in safari, but when you do it uses a different rendering engine, with different levels of support.

Take WebRTC which was recently (partially) added to iOS. It will work great in safari, but if you add the site to your homescreen, it is no longer supported.

The job of telling users to remove homescreen shortcuts to use a new feature is a nightmare.

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

#56

Post by seanwilson »

pjmlp wrote: post #54
seanwilson wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How popular is it? If it's not popular, is there a reason? I often see comments mentioning QT and Java as alternatives to Electron for cross platform apps but my impression is an order of magnitude more developers/companies side with and see the advantages of Electron instead.

Many companies outside IT see software development as a cost center, ideally outsourced somewhere, not as something where UI/UX matters.

> Many companies outside IT see software development as a cost center, ideally outsourced somewhere, not as something where UI/UX matters.

I work in IT and I see it as a small increase in UX for an order of magnitude increase in cost. I don't see how e.g. making Spotify or Slack into native apps would dramatically improve their UX.

In contrast, I think many coders are overly sensitive to CPU and memory usage to such an extent that they lose sight of business sense.

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

#58

Post by [deleted] »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #25

Great. Anyone have any suggestions for a replacement for Authy? It's a 2FA Chrome App that syncs your 2FA tokens across devices. They have a 'desktop app' now available for Mac and Windows, but of course nothing for Linux (surprise surprise). So any equivalent that will work cross platform and sync too?

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by tinus_hn »

Klathmon wrote: post #55
mephitix wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is actually "negative" support in iOS. You can add a website to your homescreen in safari, but when you do it uses a different rendering engine, with different levels of support. Take WebRTC which was recently (partially) added to iOS. It will work great in safari, but if you add the site to your homescreen, it is no longer supported. The job of telling users to remove homescreen shortcuts to use a new feature…

Can’t you automatically detect this problem and tell the users when they try to do this?
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