Google apps soon to run on iOS and Android

Published January 31, 2014 5:39pm

Soon, a new class of apps will be able to run regardless of whether they are on devices using Apple's iOS or Google's Android operating systems.

Google software engineer Andrew Grieve said the new apps are designed to act like native applications on their host operating system.

"The toolchain wraps your Chrome App with a native application shell and enables you to distribute your app via Google Play and the Apple App Store. We provide a simple developer workflow for packaging a Chrome App natively for mobile platforms," Grieve said in a blog post.

He added that a developer can run a Chrome app on a device or emulator using the command-line or an IDE; or use the Chrome Apps Developer Tool to run the app on an Android device without having to install an IDE or the mobile platform’s SDK.

Grieve said the Chrome apps for mobile will use Apache Cordova, and come four months after Google introduced similar apps for desktop OSes last September.

The toolchain is based on Apache Cordova, an open-source mobile development framework for building native mobile apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

So far, he said Google has made many of the core Chrome APIs available to Chrome Apps running natively on mobile, including:

- identity: sign-in users using OAuth2 without prompting for passwords

- payments: sell virtual goods within your mobile app

- pushMessaging: push messages to your app from your server

- sockets: send and receive data over the network using TCP and UDP

- notifications (currently Android only): send rich notifications from your mobile app

- storage: store and retrieve key-value data locally

- syncFileSystem: store and retrieve files backed by Google Drive

- alarms: run tasks periodically

This toolchain,Grieve said, is significant for developers as it provides a simple workflow for extending the reach of Chrome Apps to users on mobile platforms.

For now, he said the toolchain is in developer preview mode, but they expect to continually improve it. — KDM, GMA News

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