NOTE: The timeline has been updated, please see our October 2021 post for more details.

In January 2020, we announced that we are expanding our phased approach for ending the support of Chrome Apps. That announcement was made due to significant progress of the modern Web and its ability to deliver first class user experiences for users. We continue to invest in rich new capabilities on the Web platform and are committed to pushing the Web forward.

Based on feedback from our customers and partners, we are making the following adjustments to the Chrome app support timeline, with modifications highlighted in bold:

Scheduled Date	Action
March 2020	Chrome Web Store stopped accepting new public Chrome apps. Developers will be able to update existing Chrome apps through June 2022. Enterprise administrators may continue to submit new private and unlisted Chrome apps to the Chrome Web Store.
June 2021	General support for Chrome Apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux will end June 2021. Organizations will be able to use a policy setting to extend support on Windows, Mac, and Linux through June 2022.  General support for Chrome Apps on Chrome OS will remain enabled, without requiring any policy setting, through June 2022.
June 2022	Chrome Web Store will stop accepting new and updated private and unlisted Chrome apps. End support for Chrome Apps, NaCl, PNaCl, and PPAPI for all platforms.

This change does not impact support for Chrome Extensions. Google will continue to support and invest in Chrome Extensions on all existing platforms. Fostering a robust ecosystem of extensions is critical to Chrome's mission and we are committed to providing a useful extension platform for customizing the browsing experience for all users. 

For additional support with Chrome app migration, please visit our Chrome Apps migration site. This page will be kept up to date as we progress together through this process.

We thank our community of developers who have provided feedback to help us shape this modified and simplified approach. We are inspired by a future beyond Chrome apps, where the ecosystem continues forward progress leveraging open Web standards across all modern browsers.

Posted by Anthony Laforge, Technical Director, Chrome Platform Team

Today we’re announcing two significant changes that affect the developer experience when publishing on the Chrome Web Store. The new developer dashboard is now the default experience, and the developer registration flow has changed.

New dashboard is now the default

We recently launched a new developer dashboard for Chrome Web Store developers to try out. Following a period of feedback and improvement, we’re announcing that this new dashboard is now the preferred dashboard. This dashboard appears by default on the following events:

• When you click Settings > Developer Dashboard on the Chrome Web Store home page.
• When you follow existing bookmarks or links to the developer dashboard.
• When you navigate explicitly to chrome.google.com/webstore/developer/dashboard.

You can opt out of the default behavior by clicking Show more… in the small dialog at the bottom left-hand corner of the new dashboard, then clicking opt out:

• Transfer items
• Edit or publish a paid item, or add in-app purchases, using Chrome Web Store Payments
• View an item’s public key
• Re-order screenshots
• Preview a new version of your item or promotional tiles
• View revenue stats

For more details and status on these features see the known issues document.

Developer registration fee now required earlier

The Chrome Web Store charges a $5.00 fee to register as a Chrome Web Store developer. This fee was previously required only before publishing an item to the public, but is now required for all Chrome Web Store developers.

Who does this affect?

• Developers who previously published items to the public were required to pay the registration fee at that time. These developers do not need to pay the fee again: no action is required.
• New developers must register and pay this fee before they can use the Chrome Web Store developer dashboard.
• Previously registered developers who have never published an item to the public must now pay this fee before they can use the CWS developer dashboard. If you have published to private domain or to trusted testers, but not to the public, you will now need to pay the registration fee. Note: This will look like a new developer registration flow, but all that’s required is to pay the fee and complete the flow.

Posted by Shumeng Gu, Chrome Web Store Engineer

On May 30, Google announced the next iteration of Project Strobe, a root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to user data. This announcement included the following two updates to our User Data Policy:

• We’re requiring extensions to only request access to the least amount of data. While this has previously been encouraged of developers, now we’re making this a requirement for all extensions.

• We’re requiring more extensions to post privacy policies, including extensions that handle personal communications and user-provided content. Our policies have previously required any extension that handles personal and sensitive user data to post a privacy policy and handle that data securely. Now, we’re expanding this category to include extensions that handle user-provided content and personal communications. Of course, extensions must continue to be transparent in how they handle user data, disclosing the collection, use and sharing of that data. 

The policies for these two changes are now published to the updated User Data Policy. They will go into effect on October 15, 2019.

To ensure compliance with this policy update, we suggest developers check their extensions per the guidelines below. After October 15, 2019, items that violate these updates to the User Data policy will be removed or rejected from the Web Store and will need to become compliant to be reinstated. We will continue to take action on violations of the User Data Policy in its current form.

• Inventory your extensions' current permissions and, where possible, switch to alternatives that are more narrowly scoped. Additionally, include a list of permissions used and the reasons you require them in your Chrome Web Store listing or in an "about page" in your extension. If you expand the features of your extension and require a new permission, you may only request the new permission in the updated version of the extension.

• If your extension handles Personal or Sensitive User Data, which now also includes, user-provided content and personal communications, your Product must both post a privacy policy and handle the user data securely, including transmitting it via modern cryptography. To add a privacy policy, use the developer dashboard to link to your privacy policy with your developer account. All your published extensions share the same privacy policy.

You can find more information in the updated User Data FAQ. Thank you for joining us in building a better web with transparency, choice and control for both users and developers.

• Unclear or inconspicuous disclosures on marketing collateral preceding the Chrome Web Store item listing.
• Misleading interactive elements as part of your distribution flow. This includes misleading call-to-action buttons or forms that imply an outcome other than the installation of an extension.
• Adjusting the Chrome Web Store item listing window with the effect of withholding or hiding extension metadata from the user.

• Removal of whitespace, newlines, code comments, and block delimiters
• Shortening of variable and function names
• Collapsing the number of JavaScript files

Since speed is critical for a good experience when using the web, at Google we’re always exploring ways to make the web faster. As it turns out, one of the biggest bang-for-the-buck ways to do that is by replacing JPEG and PNG images with WebP. WebP offers significantly better compression than these legacy formats (around 35% better in most cases), and when you consider that over 60% of typical page sizes are images, the benefits can be substantial. WebP translates directly into less bandwidth consumption, decreased latency, faster page loads, better battery consumption on mobile, and overall happier users.

Case in point: the Chrome Web Store uses many large promotional images and tiles on its home page, making it a very heavyweight page. The team was eager to find ways to improve its speed, without sacrificing the user experience or giving up image quality. WebP to the rescue!

By converting PNGs and JPEGs to WebP, the Chrome Web Store was able to reduce image sizes by about 30% on average (here’s one sample image in WebP at 8.3kB and JPEG at 32kB). Given the number of requests Chrome Web Store serves, this adds up to several terabytes of savings every day.

For users, the rubber meets the road when it comes to how fast the page loads though. On this score, with WebP we were able to reduce average home page load time by nearly one-third — a huge benefit for our users.

To implement WebP, the team first added transcoding support to the image request pipeline; then at runtime the site checks whether the client browser supports WebP and requests the WebP version for each image when it does. The effort to implement it turned out to be not much work for a lot of benefit.

To find out more about how you can make your site faster, visit our Make the Web Faster site and dive into WebP.

Posted by Stephen Konig, Product Manager

Last year, Chrome introduced manifest V2 to Apps and Extension developers, which brings a variety of security and API improvements such as a default Content Security Policy. As of Chrome 18, manifest V1 was officially deprecated. At the time, we published our manifest version support schedule to give developers transparency and insight into our plans for migrating to the new version.

Today, we’re announcing a slight update to that schedule, to let developers know that they have until Monday, March 4, 2013 to make updates to their existing manifest V1-based items. After that date, the Chrome Web Store will block all updates to products based on manifest V1 unless the update includes switching it to manifest V2.

Developers are strongly encouraged to migrate their items to manifest V2 now. Follow the migration tutorial, and you can always contact us on the chromium-apps forum and our G+ page with any questions you may have.

Posted by Joe Marini, Developer Advocate

Many popular applications today help users consume, share, manage, and edit media content, as evidenced by the rise of web apps like Google Play Music and YouTube. For Chrome packaged app developers, the new Media Galleries API introduces a simple way for apps to access media stored on a user’s device (with the user’s permission, of course).

To use the API, you first have to determine what kind of permission your app needs to access user’s media:

• read-only: allows media content to be read, but not modified 
• read-write: allows media content to be read and modified 
• add-files: allows media to be added to the galleries but prevents modifying existing media files. 

Currently, only read-only access is supported. Support for read-write and add-files will be introduced in a future release.

To retrieve media content, use getMediaFilesystems(). If this is the first time your app is accessing the user’s media libraries, the system will prompt the user to grant access:



You can also make your app explicitly ask the user to designate specific galleries. This is useful if, for example, your app is only interested in pictures. Once access is granted, your app can then retrieve a list of LocalFileSystem structures. At that point, you can use the W3C FileSystem API to access the media gallery content.



NOTE: The file system APIs will only return files that the Chrome platform natively supports, and only the asynchronous version of the FileSystem API is currently supported.

We’re eager to see what great applications you will build with the Media Galleries API and the Chrome Packaged Apps platform. To get started, clone our samples repository and look at the Media Galleries sample application. Have questions or comments? Subscribe to chromium-apps and follow us on our Google+ page!

Posted by Joe Marini, Developer Advocate

Even though Chrome extensions and legacy packaged apps are similar at a technical level, users have very different expectations for how extensions and apps should look and behave. Users expect extensions to interact with the whole browser, whereas they expect apps to act solely in their containing tab or window.

Until now, all Chrome legacy packaged apps could request the same permissions and use the same APIs as extensions to interact with Chrome. In order to make the capabilities of legacy packaged apps more closely align with user expectations, we’ve decided to limit the extensions permissions that legacy packaged apps can request.

Beginning this week, you won’t be able to publish legacy packaged apps in the Chrome Web Store that request any of the following permissions:
(a) any host permissions, including "< all urls >" 
(b) the top-level "content_scripts" key 
(c) the "debugger", "devtools", "pageCapture", "plugin", "proxy", "tabs'", "history", "webNavigation" permissions 
(d) the top-level "npapi" key 

Existing legacy packaged apps in the Chrome Web Store will not be affected, and those existing apps can continue to be updated without being subject to these new restrictions. 

If you have questions, please get in touch with us on the Chromium extensions or Chromium apps groups.

Posted by Peter Ludwig, Product Manager

Chrome packaged apps aim to deliver an app experience with the appearance and capabilities of native apps, but built using the growing capabilities of HTML5. These apps can access APIs for better filesystem handling, direct access to hardware devices, raw network communication and many others. One of the new APIs that just landed in an experimental state is TCP Listen, which allows an app to accept incoming TCP connections.

Since the developer preview launch earlier this year, Chrome packaged apps have been able to connect to remote servers using TCP or UDP, and bind to a UDP port. For example, this Media Center application searches for and connects to media servers in the local network. Now, through the new TCP Listen API, a Chrome packaged app can also act as a TCP server itself and accept incoming connections on specified ports.

You can use this API, for example, to create a HTTP server on a development environment application, to automate a browser window for page load testing (see image below) or even to augment the Media Center application with a DLNA®/UPnP media server and show your PicasaWeb pictures on your DLNA® enabled television.



To get started, clone this GitHub repository and look at the webserver and the TCP server samples. You may also want to watch the Chrome Apps Office Hours where we specifically talk about the TCP Listen API.

We are curious to see what clever ideas you will come up with. Have questions or comments? Subscribe to chromium-apps and let us know!

Posted by Renato Mangini, Developer Advocate

Chrome Web Store developers can create and distribute apps and extensions that use NPAPI plug-ins. However, platforms such as ChromeOS and Windows 8 don’t support NPAPI. Today, we’re making the installation of apps and extensions that use NPAPI smarter, to help users avoid installing items that they can’t use on their particular platform.

If a user visits the Chrome Web Store on a platform that doesn’t support NPAPI, the store will filter out all items that use it from the home page and the various category pages. These apps and extensions will still show up in search results, and can be visited from direct URL links, but the Details dialog for each item will display a message that the app or the extension in question cannot be installed and the Install button will be disabled.

If you are a developer whose apps or extensions use NPAPI but can still work without it, we’ve provided a way for you to prevent your items from being filtered out. In your manifest.json file under the requirements section, specify the “npapi” flag like this:

"requirements": {
   "plugins": {
       "npapi": false
    }
 }

This will allow your apps and extensions to continue to be available to users on platforms that don’t support NPAPI. If your plug-in doesn’t have any explicit dependencies on the underlying OS, then you should really consider porting it to Native Client, which provides improved portability and security and runs just great on Windows 8 and ChromeOS.

Have any questions or comments about NPAPI? You can reach us on our developer forum for all of your store-related questions.

Posted by Joe Marini, Developer Advocate

To publish an app in the Chrome Web Store, developers need to prove they own the domain that hosts their application. Until recently, the only way to do this was through Google’s Webmaster Tools. Today, we are simplifying the process further by allowing you use Google's site verification service to prove your association with a verified site.

Suppose you want to publish an app on the Chrome Web Store and have it associated with your company’s existing site, but you don’t have the ability to use any of the current verification methods e.g. you’re not allowed to upload a verification file to the root directory. The site verification service option in the edit page for each item listed in your Chrome Web Store developer dashboard allows you to request association of your app with your organization’s site:



When you choose an existing site from the drop-down menu or click “Add a new site”, the current registered owner for the site will receive a notification of your request to be associated. The owner can see who is making the request, and then approve or deny the request appropriately. That’s all there is to it! (Note: if this checkbox isn’t available, it may be because there’s no current owner of the site or you already have an outstanding association request).

We hope that this new feature will further streamline the process for publishing new apps on the Chrome Web Store, and allows you to focus more on developing your app and less on process. Have any questions or comments about using Google’s site verification service? You can reach us on our developer forum for store-related questions or head on over to the Webmaster Help forum.

Posted by Joe Marini, Developer Advocate

Just over a month ago, at Google I/O, we announced significant changes to Chrome’s packaged application platform. These changes are intended to allow apps to break out of the browser, work offline by default, and enable richer, more immersive experiences.



With the latest version of Chrome in the developer channel, you can build, load, debug and test your apps without command-line flags, although you may need to enable experimental APIs in some cases. Because we’re still in developer preview mode, the Chrome Web Store doesn’t yet accept uploads of these new packaged apps. We’ll enable web store support later this year, and when we flip that switch, users will be able to discover and download your apps directly from the store.

In order to get started building apps, visit our developer documentation at developer.chrome.com/apps and check out our growing list of sample applications on Github (thanks for the pull requests; keep them coming). If you’d like to reach us while you’re building apps, you can join us on the #chromium-apps Freenode IRC channel, join the chromium-apps group or report an issue.

We’re also starting a regular weekly hangout every Tuesday at 9:30am (Pacific Time). Our first one will take place on Tuesday, August 14th. You can add a reminder to your calendar and then tune in at Google Developers Live. And be sure to add +Google Chrome Developers to your circles to keep up on the latest from the Chrome team.

Posted by Mike Tsao, Evolved Software Engineer

If you’re a Chrome extensions power user, you may be familiar with a task manager that looks like this:



That’s a lot of extensions running! Most of the time, they’re probably just sitting idle, waiting for the user to interact with them. Do they really need to be running and using your memory all the time?

Over the last several months, we've been working on a new feature for the extension system called Event Pages that we think will help reduce the memory used by these idle extensions. 

How They Work 

Event pages are an evolution of background pages, with one major improvement: rather than running in the background all the time, an event page only runs when it is handling events. Once an event page becomes idle, it is unloaded, freeing memory until the next time it’s needed. Learn more from the event page documentation.

To help event pages support some important use cases, we’re also developing a few new APIs.

• The alarms API allows an extension to wake itself up at set times, to support features like periodically syncing data to the cloud. 
• Some new events let extensions know when they have been installed, or when their event page is being unloaded. 
• A declarative version of the webRequest API lets extensions do network interception without the need for a background page at all. 

Try it Out 

We plan to release event pages to Chrome’s beta and stable channels late this summer, but you can start experimenting with them on the developer channel today. Try converting your overweight extension to event pages, and let us know how it works.

Posted by Matt Perry, Software Engineer

As Chrome Web Store apps and extensions have become more popular, users have been generating a large amount of reviews and feedback for developers. Until now, there was no way to separate a user’s review of an app’s features and quality from developer-focused feedback, such as the reporting of bugs, feature requests, and general questions.

To improve the feedback loop between developers and users, we’ve added a new way to get feedback directly from your users:



This feature provides a clean separation between reporting bugs and compatibility issues to developers and the rating / comments users can leave in the store relating to the functionality and usefulness of a given app. The contents of the feedback forum are publicly visible to everyone, which helps to cut down on duplicate issue reporting.

Turning the Feedback Feature On

In order to enable this feature for your store items, go to your developer dashboard and click on the “Edit your User Feedback preferences” option (highlighted below):



Engaging With Your Users

You should encourage your app’s users to engage with you via the new feedback feature by placing links to your app’s feedback page directly on your site after you’ve activated it. To do so, use the url format “https://chrome.google.com/webstore/support/yourappid”. Doing so will increase the likelihood that users will discover the feature and reinforce the idea that you actively support it.

We hope that this new feature will give users a better experience in reporting issues, requesting new features, and asking questions. Similarly, developers will now have a much easier forum to use to have an ongoing social conversation about their products.

If you have any questions about this new feature, you can reach us on our developer forum.


Posted by Siddhartha Saha, Software Engineer

Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog.

A year ago, we released a preview of the PageSpeed Insights Chrome Developer Tools extension, which analyzes the performance of web pages and provides suggestions to make them faster. Today, we’re releasing version 2.0 of the PageSpeed Insights extension, available in the Chrome Web Store.

PageSpeed Insights analyzes all aspects of a web page load and points out the specific things you can do to make your page faster. For instance, PageSpeed Insights can inform you about an expensive JavaScript call that blocks the renderer for too long, remind you about that new photo on the front page of your web site that you might have forgotten to resize or optimize, or recommend changing the way you load third-party content so it no longer blocks the page load.

PageSpeed Insights for Chrome is a Chrome Developer Tools extension that analyzes all aspects of the page load, including resources, network, DOM, and the timeline. If you're already familiar with Chrome Developer Tools, you'll find that PageSpeed Insights integrates with a toolset you're already using.



Using technologies like Native Client, PageSpeed Insights is able to run the open-source PageSpeed Insights SDK securely and with the performance of native code. Leveraging the Insights SDK enables the Chrome extension to automatically optimize the images, CSS, JavaScript and HTML resources on your web page and provide versions of those resources that you can easily deploy on your website.

We hope you’ll give PageSpeed Insights for Chrome a try and start optimizing your web pages today. We’d love to hear from you, as always. Please try PageSpeed Insights for Chrome, and give us feedback on our mailing list with questions, comments, and new features you’d like to see.


Posted by Libo Song and Bryan McQuade, Software Engineers

During these last few weeks, the Chrome Web Store team has been focused on launching the store in more countries and building some new features for developers that can help them reach and engage with more users.

New Countries 

We recently launched the Chrome Web Store in six additional countries: Turkey, Ukraine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. This means that developers can now distribute and sell their apps to millions of additional potential users.

To be successful in these new markets, we highly recommend localizing your apps in as many languages as possible. This will make them more accessible to users around the world, and more likely to be promoted in the 42 countries the store is available in.

New Offline Apps Collection

To recognize developers who have made their apps work offline - and help users find them - we created a special collection just to highlight them in the store.



If you are a developer, getting your app listed in this collection is as simple as adding the offline_enabled flag to your app’s manifest file (note: to avoid negative user feedback, please ensure that your app does indeed work well offline before you do this).

Better Information in the Developer Dashboard 

One of the common requests we’ve received from developers, is that they’d like better insight into how well their apps are doing in the store. Many of you would especially like to know how many times your apps and extensions are being viewed vs. how many installations are occurring.

To help you with your data needs, we’ve created a new graph view to help you understand the performance of your apps. To make this data more accessible, you can easily download it as a CSV file. Currently, we provide 90 days of history information.



In the near future, we plan to further refine this feature - for example, we may increase the historical period for which data is available and add other features to help you understand how your apps are being adopted.

If you have any questions about these new features, you can reach us on our developer forum.

Posted by Joe Marini, Developer Advocate

Over the past several months, the number of daily app and extensions downloads from the Chrome Web Store has more than doubled. We are now seeing millions of downloads per day. Some apps and extensions have grown even faster thanks to inline installation, a feature we launched a few months ago.

With inline installation, you can allow Chrome users who visit your web site to install your apps and extensions directly without requiring them to visit the Chrome Web Store. This creates a smoother experience for your users as it eliminates an extra step where potential users could drop off.

Here are a few examples of the impact of inline installation:

• Chrome extensions Evernote Clearly and Evernote Web Clipper derive 15% and 25% of their Chrome installations (respectively) from their inline installation implementation 
• Rovio implemented inline installation for their Angry Birds Chrome game and saw their install rate jump by almost 10%) 
• Equire, a CRM extension that integrates with Gmail, saw a 66% increase in Chrome user retention after they implemented inline installation. 

Example: Installing Evernote Web Clipper from Evernote’s Site

Implementing inline installation is very easy:
Posted by Joe Marini, Developer Advocate

Last week, the Chrome team participated in the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We all enjoyed talking to attendees about how game developers can benefit from the latest browser technologies such as Native Client and HTML5.

For those of you who were not able to attend, we recorded videos of our talks. Check them out and let us know what you think.

 

During GDC, several developers presented some new and upcoming games for the Chrome Web Store. From AirMech to the highly anticipated From Dust, these games provided a sneak peek to the future of browser-based games.

Besides being able to use the latest technology the web has to offer, creating a game for Chrome means you can distribute and monetize your game successfully. This is evidenced by our 4 brand new case studies with Kabam, Hlafbrick, Game Salad, and Limex Games.

To learn how you too can develop games for Chrome, start by visiting our game developer site.


Posted by Christian Stefansen, Product Manager