Chrome Packaged Apps could be up and running on Android and iOS as early as January 2014, according to newly discovered developer documentation from Google.
Google has been pushing adoption of its powerful ‘near-native’ packaged app technology on Chrome for Windows, Mac and Chrome OS for most of this year. The Chrome Web Store was overhauled to highlight these new apps, with the older hosted web-apps rebadged as ‘shortcuts’.
Now, in documentation discovered by TNW, Google are prepping a toolkit to help developers bring their Packaged Apps to Chrome for Android and iOS.
This toolkit will, according to the info listed on the GitHub repo for the project, allow devs to ‘[create] Android & iOS hybrid native apps with chrome app polyfills’ that, with a few design tweaks and performance testing, will be ready to “publish on the Android Play Store or iOS App Store.”
At the core a Packaged App is simply a traditional web app but given access to privileged APIs to allow it to perform more like a ‘native’ app, e.g. interact with system hardware, access storage and cloud services, run offline, etc.
Right now Google say that the mobile conversation toolkit isn’t quite ready for officially announcement, though since everything a developer needs to get started is readily available, including App Samples, there is nothing stopping impatient app makers from grabbing a head-start.
We can expect to learn more about the project in January, with Google Developer Joe Marini saying that the company ‘hope to have something in beta form’ by then.
In the meantime check out the TNW report or jump straight over to the Chrome Mobile Apps GitHub page for the full skinny.