Google Brings Chrome Apps To Android And iOS

Google’s offline Chrome Apps are about to find their way to both Android and iOS. Using Apache’s well-known open-source Cordova platform for turning web apps into native apps, Google today launched a developer preview of a toolchain for building native apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Using these tools, developers can take their existing Chrome Apps, wrap them into a native shell and submit them to Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Google is making a wide variety of Chrome APIs available for these apps, including ways to authenticate users using OAuth2, push messaging, storage and alarms. On Android, the toolchain also supports payments and rich notifications. In addition, developers also get access to the full range of APIs available through Cordova itself, which includes a wide range of services for every popular mobile platform.