Google has now announced that the company will start phasing out support for Chrome apps across Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms from this year.
The company revealed that from March this year, Chrome Web Store will not accept new Chrome apps, while developers will get the option to update their existing apps through June 2022.
The development isn’t surprising given that the company had announced back in August 2016 that it would discontinue Chrome apps. The company is citing “less usage” as the primary reason for its decision to kill the apps.
Apart from not accepting new apps from March, the company will also end support for Chrome apps on Windows, macOS, and Linux from June this year. However, customers on Chrome Enterprise and Chrome Education Upgrade will get a policy in place to extend support through December.
The search engine giant has also announced that Chrome OS users will get support for Chrome apps until June 2021. Also, the company has revealed that support for NaCI, PNaCI, and PPAPI APIs will go offline from June next year. Further, Google will end support for Chrome apps on Chrome OS for all users from June 2022.
Do note that these changes related to the Chrome apps won’t impact support for Chrome extensions in any way. The company has created a dedicated hub to provide help to developers for migrating their Chrome apps to Web apps or build Android apps for Chrome OS. Also, developers have the option to transform their experiences by working on Chrome extensions or build Progressive Web App (PWA).
