Chrome apps were launched over three years ago in an effort to bridge the gap between working offline and online. For instance, if you were working on a thesis, which was backed up to Google Docs, in the late hours of the night and found that for whatever reason you couldn’t connect to the internet. In the pre-chrome apps era, that document would have been out of reach, but Google Apps would let you work on it offline.
The app launcher would appear on your taskbar, letting you select a variety of packaged apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Scratchpad, etc. All these apps would work offline and would open dedicated apps instead of having them accessed through the browser as was the norm. However, the number of users using packaged Chrome apps is currently less than 1% of users on Windows, Mac & Linux. Meanwhile, hosted apps are already implemented as regular web apps before being hosted on Google’s separate apps platform. As a result, Google has announced that they will be discontinuing support for the platform on Windows, Mac and Linux over the next two years.
However, the platform will still be available on Google’s own Chrome OS.
“All types of Chrome apps will remain supported and maintained on Chrome OS for the foreseeable future. Additional enhancements to the Chrome apps platform will apply only to Chrome OS devices, including kiosks. Developers can continue to build Chrome apps (or Android apps) for Chrome OS.”
– Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, VP Product Management
Newly published Chrome apps from late 2016 onwards will only be available to users on Chrome OS. While existing apps will remain available on all existing platforms, it will be up to the developers to update them. However, in the second half of 2017, the Chrome Web Store will no longer show Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but will continue to surface extensions and themes. The axe will finally fall in early 2018 when users on these platforms will no longer be able to load them.
Source: Google Blog
