Google is bringing Chrome Apps to iOS and Android

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Google has announced that it has released a developer preview of a suite of tools that will allow developers to run Chrome Apps on mobile devices. Tools from Apache Cordova are used for this.

With the open source development environment Apache Cordova, software developers can build applications based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript that can access certain parts of a mobile device. For example, an application can address the camera or an accelerometer. Apps created with Cordova can run on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, WebOS, Bada and Symbian thanks to the unified javascript libraries.

Based on the Apache Cordova API, Google has released a toolchain with which Chrome Apps, applications that use Chrome’s render engine but store resources locally, can also be made suitable for mobile devices. With the toolchain, Chrome Apps can be adapted for iOS and Android and distributed via the App Store and Google Play respectively. In addition, a number of important Chrome APIs, such as identity for logging in using OAuth2 and pushMessaging for sending messages, have been made suitable for mobile use. Google warns that it is still a developer preview and therefore there may still be errors in the toolchain, but the internet company already provides the necessary documentation and sample apps.

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