Google announced today plans to discontinue Chrome apps in early 2018 for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.
Chrome apps are self-contained web applications that run inside the Chrome browser, separately from web pages, inside special containers.
Google introduced Chrome apps in the Chrome browser in 2010, and they were a moderate success.
Chrome apps weren’t as successful as everyone thought
Developers could create two type of apps, hosted and packaged apps. Google says that only 1 percent of all Windows, Mac, and Linux users used packaged apps, which are like self-standing desktop apps that could be launched via Chrome or the Chrome App Launcher (retired last month).
As for hosted Chrome apps, Google says that most of them had web-based versions, accessible via any an URL and any other browser, so there was no reason to keep a Chrome-specific app just for that.
The Google team also justifies its decision to retire Chrome apps by saying that Web-based apps have evolved over the years, and the web provides the necessary tools for developers to create web-based apps as powerful as the Chrome apps.
Since Chrome apps were created in 2010, the W3C released HTML5, CSS3, and approved a ton of APIs that support service workers, web push notifications, better multimedia playback, and tons more. Additionally, the once frozen-over JavaScript standard also received two major updates.
The deprecation timeline
Starting with late 2016, Google says that newly published Chrome apps will only be available to Chrome OS users, but not Windows, Mac, and Linux. Users will be able to access, use and update existing Chrome apps.
From the second half of 2017, users won’t be able to access Chrome apps on the Chrome Web Store if they’re using Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Beginning with early 2018, users will not be able to load any type of Chrome apps, except on Chrome OS.
Chrome apps still play a central role in Chrome OS, Google’s browser-based OS that comes installed on all Chromebook devices. Google’s Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, VP Product Management, says that Chrome apps will continue to work on Chrome OS “for the foreseeable future.”
