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Comment by Twisell | Hacker News Reader

Please excuse this naive question, but what is the point of ChromeOS/ChromeBook then?

If everything is now WebApp what's the point of an OS that can't run native App vs any other OS that can do both?

I must be missing something???

Security and simplicity. Such a low-maintenance system. When I sign in to any Chromebook, my wallpaper, shortcuts, and settings are just as I left them. For example, I may never have to find the setting to maps caps lock to escape ever again if I stick to ChromeOS.

To be fair, Windows 10 does this.

Somehow I have troubles finding lightweight win10 laptop with comparable price.

Chrome Apps were Google's idea of packaging websites as self-contained apps. They only worked within the Chrome web browser.

Now, we have Progressive Web Apps, and Google have decided to promote using open standards to achieve the same goal, rather than offering a Chrome-only solution.

Google have even released a migration guide (in 2016, when this was first announced): https://developers.chrome.com/apps/migration

Nearly every Chrome app is going to have an Android app counterpart I imagine. Chrome OS and Android are two competing platforms. Android took off and developers made zillions of Android apps, Chrome apps not so much. However Google has never shown any sign of abandoning Chromebooks. If anything, they're getting nicer and nicer and all new models run Android apps thus solving the app shortage problem on Chrome OS.

Check out this review of Samsung's latest Chromebook at CES 2020 by Chrome Unboxed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD_m6-nLvfs (btw, I don't own a Chromebook, but I am a Linux fan, and so I'm glad Google have put their weight behind Linux with Android and Chrome OS)

> If everything is now WebApp what's the point of an OS that can't run native App vs any other OS that can do both?

The point is Google's effort to acheive capability equivalence between web and native apps, so that there is no consumer-relevant difference to “cant run local apps, only web apps”. Setting a firm.date for Chrome Apps going away can be seen as equivalent to Cortes burning his ships: they are visibly abandoning their alternative to pulling off that effort.

Feature-wise, it doesn't have to do something more than the others, it just has to be able to do everything the user needs.

And for the purchase decision, there might be other factors involved as well: price, security, design, hardware, etc.

lightweight/less bloat, lower resource requirements, generally reasonably cheap hardware

I'm sure you mean this unironically, but chrome is by far the heaviest program that the majority of people run.

Well, with a webapp solution the end user is at least likely to only be running chrome once, instead of once per electron app.

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