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Google Will Kill Chrome Apps For Windows, Mac, and Linux In Early 2018 (venturebeat.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the deprecation-timeline dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today announced plans to kill off Chrome apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux in early 2018. Chrome extensions and themes will not be affected, while Chrome apps will continue to live on in Chrome OS. Here's the deprecation timeline:

Late 2016: Newly published Chrome apps will not be available to Windows, Mac, and Linux users (when developers submit apps to the Chrome Web Store, they will only show up for Chrome OS). Existing Chrome apps will remain available as they are today and developers can continue to update them.
Second half of 2017: The Chrome Web Store will no longer show Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Early 2018: Chrome apps will not load on Windows, Mac, and Linux. There appears to be two main reasons why Google is killing Chrome apps off now. First, as Google explains in a blog post: "For a while there were certain experiences the web couldn't provide, such as working offline, sending notifications, and connecting to hardware. We launched Chrome apps three years ago to bridge this gap. Since then, we've worked with the web standards community to enable an increasing number of these use cases on the web. Developers can use powerful new APIs such as service worker and web push to build robust Progressive Web Apps that work across multiple browsers." Secondly, Chrome apps aren't very popular: "Today, approximately 1 percent of users on Windows, Mac and Linux actively use Chrome packaged apps, and most hosted apps are already implemented as regular web apps. Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux will therefore be removing support for packaged and hosted apps over the next two years."

13 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Browsers are shitty application platforms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    See subject line. Please stop this web app nonsense. It's annoying and sucks.

    1. Re:Browsers are shitty application platforms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You might as well have typed, "I don't do any real work."

      If you can cope with the speed, responsiveness, UI, feature set, security, and stability of a browser app, you're either doing nothing for a living, or you're in such a niche market that you have zero competition and don't have to worry about efficiency or any other good practice.

    2. Re:Browsers are shitty application platforms by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 2

      Jupyter Notebook makes a great front end to Python and can run on hardware anywhere.

    3. Re:Browsers are shitty application platforms by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Agreed.

      Part of the problem is when this "cloud / web" stuff evaporates you have no migration path.

      At least a native app (should) continue to work for years and doesn't hold your data hostage.

  2. Chrome had apps? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Curse you, Google, for EOLing that thing I literally just learned of in its EOL announcement!

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    1. Re:Chrome had apps? by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

      Nope, this is about Chrome Apps, a specific set of APIs, not HTML5 web apps. Chrome Apps are being deprecated because HTML5's capabilities now overlap pretty much 100% and Google would prefer developers use standard ways of doing things than proprietary technologies Google owns but would have to maintain forever.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. It's Google, what did you expect? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's the main thing you get when using Google anything: Unknown lifespan.

  4. Chrome remote desktop by SeriousTube · · Score: 2

    I will miss chrome remote desktop if they are getting rid of that.

  5. Re: Spotify by acroyear · · Score: 2

    you'd have to look up the details (there's an extension to do that), but one "clue" is whether or not there is a forced nav bar from the window manager on the window. My own app was originally hosted, but at some point Chrome forced it to have the O/S's native drag-bar, which I didn't want. Packaging as a deployed app, as opposed to a hosted one, solved that. It required making other changes to the code around local storage and browser history (two items that Chrome deployed apps disabled, for reasons I still don't respect), but I did it, because the aesthetic quality of having my music player with no "chrome" from the O/S was important to me.

    So I'm rather pissed off at Chrome right now for this.

    --
    "But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
    -- Joe
  6. People will switch from Windows to ChromeOS? by raymorris · · Score: 2

    There are plenty of critisisms of Google which are reasonable. Sane people might point out how much they data-mine their users, for example.

    > So it is because no one uses them and not to be anti competitive pricks?

    So you think the idea is that people will ditch Windows and Mac, switching to ChromeOS in order to get Chrome Apps, which few people have ever heard of? On what planet does that make any sense?

      > yet they will be supported for the foreseeable future on Chrome OS?? Does that mean chrome OS sucks balls so badly it can't survive without this legacy tech to lock users in

    ChromeOS doesn't HAVE native apps. The browser is the OS usrland. With Chrome Apps, ChromeOS wouldn't have *any* apps. So yeah it makes sense to keep Chrome Apps on ChromeOS, at least until it gets support for Amdroid apps, and for a generous transition period afterward.

    Does ChromeOS suck balls? For my computer use case, yes it does. For my wife, it's perfect. It's exactly what she wants for her laptop.
     

  7. This is why I swore off proprietary platforms by hey! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At least as a developer. There's nothing like spending years building a business and development skills only to be crushed by a change in business strategy.

    I've seen this happen so many times over the years it's utterly predictable in a case like this. Supporting this stuff on Linux and MacOS must be a pita that doesn't do anything for Google other than bring apps to ChromeOS. Once ChromeOS had enough success to stand on its own Google had no reason to support other OSs as targets.

    There's only one way to target multiple OSs: non-proprietary standards. Never count on anything proprietary running on multiple platforms over the long haul.

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  8. Signal by zdzichu · · Score: 2

    That suck for Signal, as they choosed Chrome as their platform on non-mobiles. It's not a great loss, the program was limited and synchronisation didn't work for SMS.

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    :wq
  9. This kinda sucks for Signal by plazman30 · · Score: 2

    Signal built their desktop client using Chrome APIs, because it was an easy path to getting cross-platform apps. Their desktop client isn't even out of beta yet, and the APIs they're using are being killed off. This kinda sucks.