While traveling in Europe this week, I had the pleasure of going to a Google Chrome developer event put on by Mike Mahemoff (The Moff™) and Paul Kinlan (whom Paul Irish says is a genius, so that’s a good start). I took some notes during the meeting. I didn’t know tooo much about the chrome app store, so I figured I’d post what I learned in a very digestible manner for anyone who’s googling for the right keywords next week.
A bulleted list of things I learned at the meetup (other than how strong The Moff™ is in real life):
-
Here were some slides for the night: http://3.ly/y2dd
-
No date on the official release of the store but apparently “Coming soon”
-
There will be a free and a pay model, but the pay model is only launching in the US (then other markets to follow)
-
There will be a way to do billing monthly/yearly/onetime (paypal (“harder”, not sure of the specifics)/googlecheckout)
-
There will be an API to see if the user really bought something
-
5% of your revenue is theirs, rest is yours (yay) (way better than 30% - wowy)
-
Apps aren’t chrome specific. They say they’d love to make stuff work cross browser, but they are going a little bit different direction from W3C widget spec…
-
Pay to install
-
You install apps directly into the browser
-
There will be a user-permission popup for (location, notifications, storage, etc)
-
Open now… I guess this means you can build stuff that works as a chrome app already (but there’s no store)
—————–Second Half——————-
-
Apps different than websites (even though theyre both web)
-
You CAN use flash/silverlight/java if you want, but they don’t auto install, so if the user doesn’t have them, you’re SOL
-
Google hosted (if you want)
-
If you go Google hosted, they are packaged (let’s get a spec for this going!), if not, just a URL and a manifest
I stopped taking notes at this point to actually build a chrome app. It was insanely easy, so I’m happy about that. Yay chrome apps. I’d love to see how these pan out. I don’t think it can work until they are cross-browser, etc, but half the fun of them is that if it’s a chrome app, it doesn’t have to work in FF, so you can use specific APIs… so it’s a tradeoff.
Aiight. Tried to keep that as informal as possible. Hope someone wanted this info!
Alex