Google about to launch Chrome Apps for Android (Play Store) and iOS (App Store)

An advertisement for Google Chrome on the London underground

Following the deployment of offline Chrome Apps last September (great news for Chromebook users) Google has launched today Chrome Apps for Android and iOS. For now, it is only an early developer preview based on the Apache Cordova toolchain, an open source framework to ease the creation of native mobile apps using just JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Chrome Apps for Android and iOS acts as a wrapper around Cordova, in a similar fashion Phonegap and similar projects did.

This is great news for mobile developers, since as soon as this is available for everyone, deploying beautifully designed apps that work almost equally well in iOS and Android will be a breeze. Since Chrome Apps are just JavaScript, HTML and CSS, creating and designing them will be faster. At the same time, they will not be “just” like a page, but through the Cordova APIs will be able to handle Oauth authorisations, use sockets, push notifications and hopefull also access the motion sensors and GPS data.

If you are a developer interested in this, head over StackOverflow  and/or the Google Chrome project developer forums for answers to questions you may have.

Picture courtesy of fsse8info