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Chrome Web Store

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114 pointspanarky45 comments

This is part of an interesting trend that's potentially going to be very lucrative for developers.

Apple store, Chrome web store, Android market, etc. are all solving the marketing and distribution problem for developers all over the world. Furthermore with rankings and reviews the good apps will rise to the top while the bad ones will be lost in obscurity. It's increasingly a game of creating compelling products and not compelling marketing to win.

We're not quite there yet, there's still lots of work to be done with rankings, etc. but the trend is quite clear. I wonder when Mozilla will announce their app store.

https://apps.mozillalabs.com/

I always wanted to have an HN store. We have a community but we don't have a market place.

sounds like a good side project...

In Google's presentation, they said there are 120 million active Chrome users. Not just downloads, but people who use Chrome regularly.

In some countries Chrome now has more than 25% market share.

That audience could make the Chrome Web Store the biggest app store on the planet.

All the apps are built using web technologies like Javascript, HTML5 and Flash.

Stores do very litte for marketing (the popular apps are popular due to being good and having been excellently marketed both in and out of stores, put an app on store with no marketing and see how well it does).

Mobile appstore made sense since there wasn't an existing distribution or discovery infrastructure. For web apps the Internet has already solved distribution and discovery..

I see appstores as a plague and counter to the open and free Internet. A few companies are getting (for practical purposes) "monopolies". Altering the level playing field into one in which developers are beholden to appstores.

I'd have to mention an exception to the "stores do very litte for marketing". The parts of the Apple App Store that are edited / curated by employees do have a significant affect on sales and can be seen as app store marketing. Also, the commercials from Apple that show apps boost sales also.

How is an app store for web apps a "plague"? The Chrome store is another choice, not the defacto (like the Apple store). In my eye as a small time developer it gives me another avenue to get noticed, I don't see how it harms me.

Except that currently these stores do very little to create that meritocracy. I'm not sure they ever truly can.

Until then marketing is a huge part of success in these stores. Be it working with the press (blogs, traditional press, and everything in between) to good old fashioned advertising. Very few app-store developers have had sustained success without the normal marketing and sales efforts that you need with any other product (at least the ones I have insight into).

I think Google's doing themselves a disservice by trying to make the Chrome Web Store sound too much like the App Store. It sets up the wrong expectation.

There's already a user backlash visible in reviews. A lot of people are disappointed that a Gmail app is just a link to the Gmail website, for example.

Here's a quick vocabulary of Google's terms and what they actually mean:

app – website

store – directory

install an app – add a bookmark

paid app – paywall managed by Google

in-app purchase – paywall managed by third party

That's also my initial mindset as a developer, but I wonder how casual users will perceive this? Every time you open a new tab, the apps are there. It almost feels like an inventory in a game, like you "have" the app in some sense.

If nothing else, for a developer it must be hugely beneficial to get your website link to the new tab page.

I see that there is an HTML5 game for sale.

How viable is that? Wouldn't it be trivial to "steal" since you can just view the source code? Would obfuscation help at all?

I'd love to be able to sell HTML5 games, but it doesn't strike me as a realistic option.

That's truly relevant, especially if your app has offline access, and since Google is not famous for outstanding support / conflict resolution.

This http://code.google.com/chrome/webstore/docs/index.html#drm and this http://code.google.com/chrome/webstore/docs/check_for_paymen... might be useful here...

Only to an extent. Once someone has access to the source, anyone could pirate or reverse engineer it, which seems to be the GP's concern.

However, this isn't necessarily any different than binary executables, which we know experience a fair amount of pirating.

Also from that FAQ:

"Update your app frequently, so that only authorized users will always have the latest, greatest version of the app. Distributing updates is easy, thanks to Chrome's support for autoupdate. You just increment the version number in the manifest, update the ZIP file, and then use the Chrome Developer Dashboard to upload and publish the updated ZIP file. Over the next few hours, the new version of the app starts going out to its existing users."

"Don't put any roadblocks in front of users. Your app should be easy to buy, and it should work everywhere users want it to work."

That is: "Don't rely on DRM to protect you. It won't work, and you'll piss your users off."

Can someone please develop an awesome web-based IDE, so that we, developers, are not left out of the Chrome OS goodness? You can include seamless integration with github, or dropbox, for "cloud" storage. And of course, I'm assuming HTML5 will allow you to work offline.

Has anyone used Bespin and/or any existing web-based IDEs? Googling didn't return anything compelling.

I'd love a web based editor that uses Dropbox (or your cloud based storage) for storage. I use Elements editor on the iPhone but for when I just have a browser...

(Similarly I'd feel a lot more comfortable with Google Applications if I could tell it to store my documents on my storage, or at least seamlessly mirror to my storage)

For writing apps completely in JavaScript (both client-side and server-side) there's http://www.erbix.com/ which provides hosting, online IDE and a marketplace for JS apps. It doesn't have yet source version control integration but you can upload or download directories as .tar.gz or .zip archives. (Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with the project)

Our HTML prototyping tool Quplo (http://quplo.com) is a web-based IDE for designers and developers. It doesn't have github, dropbox, or server-side coding (offline support is on the way). It's purely meant for developing prototypes. But it's a start. We'd love to see more products in this arena and we'll definitely be making sure we're in the Web Store ASAP.

@primgenus, @vladd. good luck to you and your teams!

Anybody figured out how to setup a paid app? I already have an extension in the gallery but I don't see anywhere to set a price for it.

Also, it appears that only US and UK developers can be a Google Checkout merchant, except for the Android Market where anyone from one of a bazillion different countries can sell.

However, the Chrome Web Store developer ToS seems to imply that other payment processors can be used, provided they are approved by Google. It doesn't say who those payment processors are or how they integrate with the store.

So yeah, anybody figured out how it all works?

It is possible to monetize the chrome applications using ads? I am looking in the terms of use, but I dont find anything against it.

Yes it is. Its like the web, once the user goes to your App you can show them whatever you want.

Yes it is:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hbadbkkklnhamjjeag...

(Mibbit Chrome app, free version, ad supported)

I wonder if this means the Android Market's official web front-end is almost ready to go.

They previewed it at Google IO and it still hasn't surfaced :-(.

Get ready to play some PopIt. Actually, I've never heard of this game before. But now that it's shipping with chrome I can play it all the time at work.

Are these web apps hosted on a google server or on the publishers?

The apps are hosted by the publisher. You can also create a fully offline installable app, which is all the files of the app plus a manifest in a ZIP package.

This is so distressing, it really is the return of desktop apps. So much for all the progress we've made, it feels like we're going backwards 10 years. I've been meaning to write a blog post on this for over a year now, maybe this will motivate me.

Do you care to elaborate now? What about this situation makes you feel like we're going backwards? What announcement would have made you feel like part of the future, if not this?

No, I unfortunately can't elaborate properly now. Once things calm down this week I'll be able to put together a reasoned blog post. Hopefully you'll vote it up when you see it.

But to be unfairly brief, anything that requires a download to run offline, or requires publishers to "upload" their apps is a step backwards. Since all that entails is literally running a desktop app. There's nothing there that couldn't be done 10 years ago, the only difference is that the apps have to be written in web technologies or not, using NativeClient. In my mind this is a step backwards, and essentially an unnecessary end run around the web solely for the purposes of monetization. I'll fully elaborate in an upcoming blog post tentatively titled "1 step forward, 2 steps back".

If you don't download something, how can you have it to run it offline? If a publisher doesn't put a file in a globally reachable location, how do others acquire it?

As mentioned previously, I unfortunately don't have the time to elaborate now, look for that blog post I mentioned within the next week or so to answer your question.

Here's more info on how the 'installable apps' work: http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/

"Many installable web apps are hosted apps—normal websites with a bit of extra metadata. You can build and deploy hosted apps exactly as you would build and deploy any web app, using any server-side or client-side technologies you like. The only difference is that you must provide a small manifest file that describes the app.

If you want your app to work especially well offline or to be tightly integrated with the Google Chrome browser, you can create a packaged app. A packaged app is just a web app that the user downloads. Packaged apps have the option of using the Google Chrome Extension APIs, allowing packaged apps to change the way Chrome behaves or looks."

It's backwards because, if this trend continues, every publisher is going to be supporting x different versions of y different platforms. iOS 2,3,4 + android 1,2 + chrome + mozilla ... etc.

Standard web development has it's own support problem (browser discrepancies). But that pales in comparison to what supporting all of these store platforms would be like.

I see these apps more as browser extensions than as standalone, downloaded applications.

I want Firebug installed locally in Firefox (or better yet integrated directly into the browser like Chrome does). I don't want to download a bunch of Javascript every time.

Here's the developer guide for more on how it works under the covers: http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index.html

Can you point out an example of an offline app in the current store? All the apps I've tried so far seem to literally just be an icon + link to a website on my start page.

Write Space - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aimodnlfiikjjnmdch...

Stickies - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/obcojdaihjmblkmodn...

We developed two package app: Read later fast https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/decdfngdidijkdjgbk...

Quick Note: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mijlebbfndhelmdpml...

These apps seem to be nothing more than links to websites.

Am I missing something?

Indeed. I expected some sort of trimmed down simpler versions that would load more easily on a Chrome OS netbook. So far I've tried MapQuest and Evernote, and both just showed up as the regular bloated websites that they are upon 'installation'.

Indeed. Plus, some games are Flash based. Chrome OS is going to be bundled with Flash? Hoo-raay.

it will be interesting to see if this is a way for google to provide a marketplace within ios devices (specially) via a potential release of chrome for iphone/ipad/ipod, effectively allowing android developers an in to both consumer groups.

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