Google Wants Progressive Web Apps To Replace Chrome Apps (androidpolice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police: The Chrome Web Store originally launched in 2010, and serves a hub for installing apps, extensions, and themes packaged for Chrome. Over a year ago, Google announced that it would phase out Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux in 2018. Today, the company sent out an email to developers with additional information, as well as news about future Progressive Web App support. The existing schedule is mostly still in place -- Chrome apps on the Web Store will no longer be discoverable for Mac, Windows, and Linux users. In fact, if you visit the store right now on anything but a Chromebook, the Apps page is gone. Google originally planned to remove app support on all platforms (except Chrome OS) entirely by Q1 2018, but Google has decided to transition to Progressive Web Apps:

"The Chrome team is now working to enable Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to be installed on the desktop. Once this functionality ships (roughly targeting mid-2018), users will be able to install web apps to the desktop and launch them via icons and shortcuts; similar to the way that Chrome Apps can be installed today. In order to enable a more seamless transition from Chrome Apps to the web, Chrome will not fully remove support for Chrome Apps on Windows, Mac or Linux until after Desktop PWA installability becomes available in 2018. Timelines are still rough, but this will be a number of months later than the originally planned deprecation timeline of 'early 2018.' We also recognize that Desktop PWAs will not replace all Chrome App capabilities. We have been investigating ways to simplify the transition for developers that depend on exclusive Chrome App APIs, and will continue to focus on this -- in particular the Sockets, HID and Serial APIs."

Comments

Re:This is why I don't use develop using Google te

[bickerdyke]

There is a 99.9% chance that your "web app" was either nothing more than a glorified bookmark that registered an icon in your start menu and did nothing more than redirecting to a regular website. If you actually used javascript running locally, local storage, or other webapp features, that was basically only thenew fancy HTML5 stuff to begin with and that won't go away either, You mostly have to do a boilerplate update.

Re:WTF is Progressive Web Apps?

[AmiMoJo]

They are web sites that are installable and can run like native apps.

They are an interesting idea because they bring mobile app style sandboxing and permissions to desktop apps. Since the app it basically HTML, CSS and Javascript there are very mature sandboxes available to run them in, and in fact you have a choice of sandbox from your favourite browser vendor, opening up the possibility of extreme levels of control and in-app ad-blocking.

There are limits to what these apps can do, so they are mostly suited to highly networked stuff like cloud services, advanced web site interfaces like the Twitter and Facebook apps on mobile, messenger clients etc.

Microsoft are in trouble because these compete with their failed Metro apps on Windows, and make Windows itself kind of irrelevant because now the browser is the OS and the cloud is the disk. Obviously /.ers are not going to be happy with that.

Re:WTF is Progressive Web Apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what apps do you use that do not rely on a central server anyway because the primary goal of such apps is to do stuff together with others (chat, social network, managing data) or to offer computationally intensive features (voice recognition, route planning with many realtime variables etc.). It all requires a central server anyway

Err, no it doesn't. Half a seconds thought and I've come up with a multitude of things which do not need a central server for anything. How ever did you come up with such a stupid statement?

So, without further ado, that'll be Excel for your accounts, Word for your CV, and any other number of *many* apps out there that do not /need/ a central server to do local work. Writing a book? Doesn't need a central server. Playing a local game? Those don't 'need' central servers and certainly worked before the internets.

A great many /creative/ things do /not/ need to plugged into the f*cking internet to get stuff done.

Re:This is why I don't use develop using Google te

[johanw]

Psst, did you know about the targetSdkVersion setting in build.gradle? So you can keep using the OS quirks you like?