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

Posted by BeauHD on from the repeal-and-replace dept.

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."

6 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. WTF is Progressive Web Apps? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And how are they different from normal web apps?

    1. Re:WTF is Progressive Web Apps? by Z80a · · Score: 5, Funny

      They ask you for your preferred pronouns before running and have fonts adapted for reading with problem glasses.

    2. Re:WTF is Progressive Web Apps? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      https://medium.com/@adactio/wh...

      Reliable - Load instantly and never show the downasaur, even in uncertain network conditions

      Jeremy Keith
      A web developer and author living and working in Brighton, England.

      Why does that not surprise me? Brighton is basically the hipster capital of the UK.

      Likewise, Progressive Web Apps consist of:

      1. HTTPS,
      2. A service worker, and
      3. A Web App Manifest

      It seems like cache some html pages. They have an Javascript worker thread, and the thread queries the remote server. If there's no connection to the server you get the cached html page with the old data rather than that irritating T Rex jumping cactuses game that you'd otherwise get in Chrome Mobile.

      I suppose it's progress of a sort - Google have finally realised that not everyone has a internet connection all the time. Then again that's rather obvious - even in somewhere like NYC you lose your network connection on the subway between stops so an application which needs a connection all the time to run is unusable. Also it's a lot easier to find developers who can do Javascript and HTML than it is ones who can do Java.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    3. Re:WTF is Progressive Web Apps? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Fantastic! by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can't wait to transition to PWAs so that one day they can tell me it will stop functioning at the end of the month and all my related data will be deleted. This is much better than the garbage applications that keep working even when you are offline. Honestly, how do they expect to spy on my entire life without internet connectivity?! ;)

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  3. Re:This is why I don't use develop using Google te by bickerdyke · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    bickerdyke