Google has indicated that it will stop using separate Chrome apps. The company has started to reduce support for the apps and only focuses on extensions.
Google has indicated that it will gradually phase out support for traditional Chrome apps from June.
Google said in a blog post on Tuesday that it would stop accepting new Chrome apps in March. Existing apps can be updated up to 2022.
Google will stop supporting Chrome apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems in June. Educational institutions and companies will have a little more time until December 2020 to get their affairs in order.
Google had already said four years ago that it would gradually phase out the Chrome apps on Windows, Mac and Linux in 2018. The company seems to have waited longer than announced before starting this process.
The other platform affected by this is of course Google’s own Chrome OS and Chromebooks, for which the apps were originally developed. Chrome apps are supported on this platform until June 2022, with extra time for education and business customers until December of that year.
Google will continue to invest in and support the extensions of Chrome. Both the Chrome apps and the Chrome extensions are accessible via the Chrome Web Store.
Chrome apps and Chrome extensions are somewhat similar. In 2010, Google defined the difference between the two: A Chrome app is “something richer and more interactive than a website, but less cumbersome and monolithic than a desktop application,” such as a game or a photo editor. A Chrome extension is a bit easier: it extends the number of functions of Google Chrome: “Extensions also offer functionality, but unlike apps, there is little or no UI component.” An example of an extension could be a currency converter, accessible via a button on the Chrome taskbar.
According to Google, Chrome apps will be replaced by rich web apps, which will essentially mimic the function of a Chrome app within a web page. Google has a developer-focused transition page where the company encourages developers to build Progressive Web Apps, or a combination of an extension and a web app, so that the extension can load the UI of the web app from an external page. Google apparently thinks these web-like PWAs for Chromebooks will be common by the time Chrome apps say goodbye in a few years.