Chris Alexander

On Engineering

Google Chrome Web Store

The App Store For The Web

26th May, 2010

Among the plethora of announcements and releases made at Google IO, a new major feature for Chrome was announced.

The Chrome Web App Store aims to bring the app store experience you get on the iPhone and Android to your web browser. It allows application developers to turn their sites into mini app listings, which users can then link to in an enhanced bookmark-like way from their Chrome home screen.

Many people have asked what the point of this exactly is. But then Google mentioned that this feature will be a part of Chrome OS, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

One thing that I myself have wrestled with in the past is that it is extremely difficult to completely change someone’s way of working in one go. So in order to make the Chrome OS experience at least a little bit familiar to the desktop and mobile users they are targeting, it requires some kind of equivalent to those models - and this app store provides just that.

I’m looking forward to being able to add this functionality to various applications, and have a play with the new ability in Chrome.

For more coverage on the Chrome Web App Store, check out what Techcrunch (x2), Engadget, TheNextWeb, Gizmodo and Mashable had to say about it.