Google to end support for Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux in early 2018, stop surfacing them in the Chrome Web Store in the second half of 2017
We have always believed in making the open, interoperable web as strong as possible. For a while there were certain experiences the web …
Context & Ripple Effects
The deprecation is the third step in a deliberate retreat: Google already killed the Chrome app launcher on Windows, Mac, and Linux in mid-2016, and has been pruning old platforms with moves like retiring Chrome support for Windows XP, Vista, and older Mac versions. Chrome apps existed because the web couldn't yet deliver certain native-class experiences — Google's own framing here is that the gap has closed.
What changes today is the timeline: apps stop appearing in the Chrome Web Store in the second half of 2017, and support ends entirely on Windows, Mac, and Linux in early 2018. The one place they survive is Chrome OS, which reveals the real strategy — the app layer was always scaffolding for Google's own desktop platform.
First-order effects
- Developers who built Chrome apps for desktop users must migrate those experiences to standard web technology before early 2018 or lose their Windows, Mac, and Linux installs outright.
- New users stop discovering Chrome apps in the Web Store from the second half of 2017, cutting off the acquisition funnel for existing apps well before the hard cutoff.
Second-order effects
- Chrome OS becomes the sole remaining market for Chrome apps, concentrating that developer base on Google's own hardware platform rather than the general desktop web.
- Desktop users lose an installable-app alternative inside the browser, pushing them back toward either native applications or whatever progressive web replacements developers build.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to Chrome consolidating around the open web platform itself, with proprietary in-browser app layers retired once web standards catch up — a trajectory confirmed when Google later set a full phase-out across all operating systems (after shutting down the Web Store's app section in 2017) targeting July 2022.
- For the broader industry, it signals that browser vendors no longer need proprietary app runtimes to compete with native software, shifting the battleground to how capable standard web APIs become.
The trend: Google is systematically stripping non-web layers out of Chrome — legacy OS support, the app launcher, and now Chrome apps themselves — leaving the open web as the only application platform the browser supports.