Installable home screen web apps in Chrome Beta for Android | Hacker News Reader

Installable home screen web apps in Chrome Beta for Android

developers.google.com

57 pointsjcomis22 comments

It works pretty good. You can test it with my app : http://hn.premii.com/ - HN Web client for mobile.

* Compare to Safari Add to homescreen, chrome remembers where you were last when you reopen the app. On ios, it will start the app again. Also, chrome opens _blank target links in a browser instead of opening in the web app.

Warning: Don't uninstall the web app using tap+hold - uninstall. It will uninstall chrome beta. Just do tap+hold - remove.

Uninstalling chrome beta is a bug. I'll get that raised.

This just completely removed the need for the GitHub native app, as the responsiveness of the mobile site is way better than the native app anyways.

this is terrific. i'm baffled as to why google, msft, amzn, samsung and other device makers are not pushing harder to advance html5 and web apps as a way to attract more devs and eventually loosen apple's stranglehold on the app economy.

why not offer direct access to mobile hardware and user information (e.g., mic, photos, contacts) through the device's native browser? they could mimic security restrictions of native apps and only permit access upon explicit approval (e.g., tap here to let site X access your camera and contacts). obviously, they can't wait for html5 standards, and would need to act on their own. but at least this would attract devs who want a web stack instead of forcing them to use the device's native language and the slower app approval process.

i'm not suggesting this will end apple's hegemony; it won't. devs will always build first for the platform where they can earn the highest ROI, which is usually the one with the most (profitable) users. yet minimizing barriers for devs to build, release, and test on a new platform would attract more devs and at least force apple's hand at maintaining web parity on ios devices.

are these companies afraid of undermining their own app stores? are mobile devices too slow still?

smart people run these companies. html5 is making some inroads, but there must be a reason why apple competitors are not pursuing this route more aggressively.

  - "this is terrific. i'm baffled as to why google, msft, amzn, samsung and other device makers are not pushing harder to advance html5 and web apps as a way to attract more devs and eventually loosen apple's stranglehold on the app economy."

Which is kind of a stupid thing to say since the Iphone does exactly that since its first version ,you can install webapps on your home screen and run them fullscreen, even before allowing developpers to build native apps.

Developpers ASKED for native apps on the iphone.

Anyway , do you really think that all the brands you cited dont want to be exactly where Apple is ? they are not interested in "sharing" the app economy. They want all of it and destroy the competition,just like Apple.

  - "yet minimizing barriers for devs to build, release, and test on a new platform would attract more devs and at least force apple's hand at maintaining web parity on ios devices."

It's like the TESSEL stuff all over again.

phone / embedded apps must have an higher engineering standard than desktop apps , because they run on limited hardware,with limited processing power and battery. if your iphone app takes to much memory the system will kill it , and rightfully so.

And mobile OS dont work the same way.

You want to program for the least common denominator ? that's what webapps are for, but I dont want a webapp to access my contacts.

Once they launched the App Store they started doing things like not allowing new performance features (javascript JITing) into webapps. ( they've since fixed it: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/06/ios-5-brings-nitro-spee... )

> but I dont want a webapp to access my contacts.

I do, as long as there is permissions integration.

So, what's a good list of webapps that work well from the homescreen? I know about things like Facebook and forecast.io, but I'd love to know about more. The less apps (that rely on a network connection to be useful) that I have to download and keep updated the better!

Edit: Oh, reading the doc more closely, it looks like webapps have to manually support this with a head tag. That's a bit unfortunate.

they also support the apple tags, but that's going to be deprecated

----

Chrome will also allow Web Apps to launch in “App mode” if they embed a meta tag using the “apple-mobile-web-app-capable” name. Chrome will stop supporting this usage in an upcoming release. Chrome currently shows a deprecation warning in the Developer Tools’ console log when it detects a page with only the “apple-mobile-web-app-capable” meta tag. The warning appears as follows:

There are a lot of web sites that are far better than any native-app. I've never found an app better for sports scores than ESPN.com, for example. Facebook is another great candidate. I'd love to sandbox that puppy in a Chrome frame. This is great to hear.

"Facebook"

Didn't Mark Zuckerberg make news when he admitted that going HTML5 was a mistake...& promptly reversed course by opting for native on both iOS and Android ? As far I can remember, HTML5 Webview facebook on iOS was horrible.

That's not exactly what pkulak is referring to. I think they mean simply using facebook.com in browser on mobile is a better experience compared to the native app. I agree with that, especially with the "give us access to everything" permissions the Facebook android app has.

FINALLY

I use web apps on my smartphones pretty much entirely. It's why I can use my BlackBerry, my Android 4.3 phone, and my Nokia N9 -- swapping between them is perfectly fine as I don't rely on any apps that need native code for the most part.

Android had the worst experience. Add a home screen icon with Chrome and get a tiny bookmark icon (a step back from the original Browser which used apple-touch-icon). Finally it is on par with iOS and I can't wait to see what they do with OS integration :D

I'm wondering what the benefit is of opening these apps in full screen, without any browser capabilities? Why not just allow users the option to run any browser tab in full-screen, and separately allow adding web shortcuts in the home screen that open in browser.

These 'home screen web apps' will just complicate things for the average user, since now users will get a different UI depending on whether they are visiting the site from a browser, or using the same site from the home screen.

That's cool, but what about PNaCl? If somehow I could run native code on Chrome/Android - all nicely within a secure sandbox without having to deal with Java/IDE/Emulator/SDK/Versioning hell wouldn't that be great?!

> How can I detect if the app is running as an installed app? >> You can’t, directly.

Couldn't you compare the window size to the screen size using JS?

Can't wait for chrome packaged apps on Android

----

any good example sites of the OP?

How does this work with intents?

It doesnt , it's basically a fullscreen browser tab.

Hope Apple will change it's policy and allow this for chrome on iOS (i guess not :-/)

Don't really see the need when this exact functionality down to the last detail has been a part of iOS Safari since iPhone OS 1.0.

What would be the advantage? Chrome on iOS is just a reskinned Safari minus Nitro.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com