Google killing app format used only by The 1% Chalk up another fail for Google, which has decided it's time to do away with Chrome apps on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Chrome what? “Chrome packaged apps”, dear reader, an effort Google launched back in 2013 and suggested could offer a great way to package apps for multiple operating systems that launched from within Chrome …
More than annoying. I have been on contract with a company which has put their eggs in that basket so I imagine they won't be pleased. And I would imagine that will be an understatement.
Those who never use packaged apps will not miss them. For those who do it will require some thinking on how to rework things for non-Chrome OS users. Developing for Chrome OS made sense when packaged apps also catered for cross platform deployment, but when that is gone it is likely to be back to native app development and tough luck for Chrome OS users.
> I have been on contract with a company which has put their eggs
> in that basket so I imagine they won't be pleased.
Well, anyone who trusts Google to continue with supporting their products in the long term is clearly unaware of how Google operates.
There's enough precedent for this kind of behaviour that I personally would avoid placing any firm reliance on any Google product.
Google has a number of core products that are likely to remain indefinitely -- GMail, Analytics, Adsense Maps, and of course Search. If you're using those, then you're probably safe (albeit you've been suckered into feeding your most intimate data into the Google machine). Anything else with the Google (or Alphabet) name on it is suspect and you should full expect them to pull the plug on any functioning product with minimal notice.
"There's enough precedent for this kind of behaviour that I personally would avoid placing any firm reliance on any Google product."
Yup. :-( Just discovered Translate on iOS7 no longer works (can't correct to server) and the updated Translate works on iOS8 or later...
[no, I don't plan to update; mine's a 16GB model and I don't fancy installing an OS twice the size of the last install with no clear additional benefit - there's going to be a lot of space wasted on features I don't need nor want]
Replaced it with a shortcut to the website but that's hardly the same thing...
Those who never use packaged apps will not miss them. For those who do it will require some thinking on how to rework things for non-Chrome OS users. Developing for Chrome OS made sense when packaged apps also catered for cross platform deployment, but when that is gone it is likely to be back to native app development and tough luck for Chrome OS users.
Precisely. The worst part of this is the network effect it will have on ChromeOS, which needs a packaged app ecosystem of some sort to be credible. Maybe native offline web apps is the replacement, but I'm afraid it'll probably be more along the lines of the ARC and Android portability.
Well, anyway, probably no more gamebooks for me for when the Internet isn't there on my ChromeBook for a bit. Guess I'll just have to turn to my iPhone for exactly the same apps, and pay more for the privilege.
Google is very good at this sort of thing, isn't it?
... if I had any hope they'd keep them going. Got burnt once with Google Latitude (personally, the most useful thing that wasn't search; and I know alternatives exist but...).
After Wave, G+, that home-automation thin they bought and killed, etc. why bother? "Just" Android, Chrome, search and maps; everything else is ephemeral.
As a daily Chromebook user this news is quite annoying.
For every brilliant feature and advancement they put into Chrome and ChromeOS, they take another great one away. They're making ChromeOS more and more distant from Chrome on all other operating systems that I fear it's going to become far to niche to maintain and they'll just throw the towel in, rendering thousands of existing users' perfectly serviceable laptops useless ...
(Queue 'useful' responses such as: 'Why do you have a Chromebook in the first place?', 'ChromeOS is garbage' and other such classics.)
Google loves to knife their products if they can't get popular the way their major products are, which doesn't bode well for ChromeOS. But far worse for ChromeOS's life expectancy is the talk about "merging" ChromeOS and Android.
Given that Android has a userbase hundreds of times larger, that means "give Android an optional desktop interface" and ChromeOS goes buh-bye. Hopefully an interface that doesn't remind one of Windows 8.
This announcement is probably the start of the ChromeOS phaseout, to insure developers don't waste any further time on it.
I do find this quite irritating, I use Chrome Remote Desktop frequently, and while Authy can probably be an extension and Secure Shell can probably be a PWA, I don't know if "open web technology" will allow Chrome Remote Desktop to run without any additional software. People keep telling me that Google will have their reasons - and I just keep thinking - yeah they told us when they removed the notification center that they would replace it with something more useful, and they didn't - so now apps and websites can send us push notifications which if we don't see them within 10 seconds then vanish into oblivion. Clearly this is so much more useful than having a central service which collects these notifications so that we can review them when it is convenient to do so.....
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