Google Chrome Web Store opens up to developers
At the Google I/O this year, Google announced they they would soon be launching a web store of sorts where people will be able to sell their web applications and potentially change for the services.
This web store would be accessible just like the Google Chrome Extension gallery. In fact even the mechanism for installing such applications is quite similar to installing extensions, since they are both packaged as .crx files. Through the Chrome Web Store developers will be able to sell both “packages apps” and “hosted apps”. The difference being that “hosted apps” are simply websites which provide some metadata (icon etc) such that a Google Chrome user can add the web app to their browser, however the entirety of the application itself will be hosted online at its own site. The Chrome Web Store would thus give Chrome users a way to discover such applications.
On the other hand “packaged apps” will install all their content offline and might even be usable offline. Applications such as games, for example, could be installed to the users’ hard disks thus saving loading time. Such applications could even have access to the same features that Google Chrome extensions have, essentially making them Google Chrome extensions which run in a single tab.
Now the web store has opened it’s doors to developers for uploading their own applications, just as Google did with extensions when they first launched that feature.
Unfortunately, while this is supposed to be an open webstore, it is highly reliant on Google Chrome, which hampers its openness.