Google Chrome Apps

» see chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in august 2016 google published a number about one of its own products. roughly one percent of chrome users on the desktop actively opened a chrome packaged app. i was in the other ninety nine, and so was almost everybody who has ever installed the browser.

chrome apps came in two shapes and the first one barely counted. a hosted app was a manifest file with a url inside it, which is to say a bookmark with an icon and a store listing. the packaged app was the real attempt. google shipped it properly on 5 september 2013 under the plain name chrome apps, and it ran in its own window with no address bar and no tab strip. it worked offline by default and could talk to usb and bluetooth devices, which no ordinary web page was permitted to do.

the reason it existed is easy to reconstruct. in 2013 the web could not reach hardware and could not put a shortcut on your desktop that opened without a browser wrapped around it. google wanted both of those and did not want to wait for a standards process. so it built them into chrome as a private platform and distributed them through a store it also owned, with html as the only language a developer had to learn.

i am a computer engineer and this was aimed squarely at people like me. write the thing once in html, get a window and a shortcut and a permission model out of it. i never built one. almost nobody did, and google's own figure says almost nobody ran one either. the platform sat in the gap between a browser tab, which was already good enough for most of what people wanted, and a native binary, which was what the remaining people actually wanted.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the two announcements ~

the first one came on 19 august 2016. google said it would remove chrome apps from the desktop operating systems over roughly two years and published the one percent figure as the reason, while promising chromeos support for the foreseeable future. the foreseeable part did most of the work in that sentence. on 6 december 2017 the apps filter quietly disappeared from the chrome web store search panel, so extensions and themes remained as categories and apps did not.

the second announcement, on 15 january 2020, was the one with dates in it. march 2020 for the store to stop accepting new chrome apps, with existing ones updatable until june 2022. june 2020 for the end on the three desktop operating systems, extended to december for enterprise. june 2021 for native client and the ppapi plugin interface, and for consumers on chromeos. june 2022 for everyone else on chromeos. covid pushed some of those right by a few months in an august 2020 revision, but the shape held.

~ what replaced it ~

progressive web apps, which is to say the same idea rebuilt as standards other browsers could implement. a manifest file and a service worker to handle offline, plus a growing pile of device apis that eventually reached usb and bluetooth. the difference is ownership. a chrome app only ran where google said it ran, and a pwa runs wherever a browser has caught up.

that is a better outcome and it took eight years longer than anybody wanted. developers who had shipped a chrome app in 2013 spent 2020 and 2021 rewriting it, and a lot of them did not bother, because the audience that had justified the work was the one percent.

~ the part still running ~

chrome apps are not entirely gone, and the place they survived is the least glamorous one available. schools and companies running managed chromeos fleets built things on the platform that nobody was ever going to rewrite, mostly kiosk terminals and single-purpose classroom machines. google extended enterprise and education support in october 2021, then extended it again, and the current published end is april 2027 for kiosk mode with october 2028 for everything remaining in managed environments.

so the platform outlives its own obituary by six years, running on hardware bolted to a wall in buildings where nobody thinks of it as software. that is where dead web platforms usually end up. flash lasted longest in the same rooms.

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