I have not for the life of me been able to imagine the purpose of building a Chrome app. Now I can.... but wait... isn't it just a "lipstick on the pig" html5 web app?
It lets me feed in head-tracking data from the Rift, while avoiding the latency that you'd get from using something like WebSockets. I'd use something like vr.js, but that's an NPAPI plugin and Chrome is retiring those.
Unfortunately Windows-only (and maybe Linux with some adjustment) so far, since the USB API doesn't yet properly work with HID devices on OSX.
It would be great to have a major company supply a fully cross-platform html5 app framework.
We're very committed to the Cordova platform, and we're very active in pushing it forward.
Though there are a lot of individuals, and companies, involved, I suspect that, by any measure, Google is one of the top contributors to Cordova these days.
I have an app in the Android Market (er, Play Store) built with the old open source PhoneGap.
And as somebody else mentioned, it gives you access to the USB JavaScript APIs, which is pretty cool.
It shouldn't mean much for large projects, but it does mean companies can hire less-skilled "programmers" to churn out minimally viable products whether that be for bootstrapped start-ups or to satisfy the demand from businesses that want to say "look I have a presence on mobile."
You are calling out people who started learning programming with HTML and CSS and telling them they are not programmers but you don't realize that your first program with BASIC was basically same shitty code copied from your book and you were thinking you were a "programmer". I don't know you are skilled or not but I know you are not "professional".
This was sort of noticeable when Google had to add some fairly basic pointers on the developer site about not doing daft things in loops on Android. They were useful pointers, but pushing everything to the web where every man and his dog can write apps that perform badly whilst wobbling precariously on top of a browser interpreter doesn't seem ideal to me. Quick to write though, eh?!