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Comment by earbitscom | Hacker News Reader

There is a bunch of functionality that you can do with Chrome apps, such as desktray alerts, background music streaming, etc. Most of the "apps" in the store do not do this and are mostly just links to sites, but there are plenty of things you can do with Chrome as an app that go beyond regular browser capabilities.

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Those are features of Chrome and not really an "app". It is not new for web developers to target specific features of a web browser. I have not qualms about calling Chrome apps that can be ran offline apps. Perhaps I am looking at this from the wrong perspective. For Chrome OS, a link that is acting like an app that you can "Alt+Tab" to would play better into the idea of an app than another tab in your Chrome browser. Almost every "app" on the chrome store I have interacted with has been an app-like icon that is a link to a URL that functions identically in Firefox or other browsers.

I think earbitscom is talking about the protected APIs in Chrome. There are APIs that regular web sites get and there are APIs that extensions/packaged apps get (like local file storage). Chrome Web Store is still a weird concept for me, but especially so when most of the 'apps' are, as you mention, fancy bookmarks.

Some Chrome apps aren't just a few specific browser features though, they're literally full packages that you download that have the ability to go through your files, run native code, access to bluetooth, USB, the ability to embed a WebView (like with Android), access to everything extensions can do and more.

Even some of the "bookmarks" add extra functionality to a site that wouldn't have been able to be granted otherwise, like unlimited storage, access to the clipboard and the ability to run in the background.

It would be very useful if the bookmark ones were a separate category, just like there's a distinction between extensions and apps.

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