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