Our app is built on Qt-C++ which acts as a backend. For front end, we invoke browser command in a given platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). Now the Javascript of browser and the C++ of backend communicate via WebSockets. All the rendering happens fine and app works well.
[Note: It turns out that, Qt's Web-engine is not a good option due to its size and inflexibility.]
However in the case of mobile apps there are few concerns.
We cannot invoke the chrome browser as we do in Desktops, because the main app goes in background and brings the "Google Chrome" (browser) app in foreground
The default choice is Webview, but there are few limitations of it as noted here
Our app is not heavy in rendering. Though it requires playing of video and webrtc (which is available with some of the Android webviews).
What is the best solution when the android app requires the features of Google chrome browser app?
Related: Are there any ways to embed a browser in Android app?
I have tested succefully my android app in windows chrome browser thanks to ARC & ARC welder. What is preventing me from distributing the generated zip for chrome browser? I assume there are not technical constraints as I can locally install the application in the browser.
I would just like to now distribute it to chrome os or chrome browser on windows/linux through the chrome webstore but when I try to install it from the chrome webstore I'm told the application requires chrome os, which is puzzling since I can run it in chrome browser.
Is this an issue of packaging the app and the app runtime for chrome or security ?
Any information from google team on the roadmap for running android app in chrome browser would be most welcome. Otherwise I do not really see the point of porting apps for the sole population of chrome os users.
Unfortunately this is a question that cannot really be answered with absolute certainty, unless you have insider information. If you want my 2¢, I think this will be an option when it is out of beta. I believe that they are restricting distribution to chrome os so that they do not have to support all distribution platforms while in beta, and will probably open up to other operating systems soon.
I'm working on the idea of a project that has to run as well online (via a remote server) and offline, on desktop (Linux/Mac OS X / Windows) and Firefox OS / Android mobile devices (Windows Phone and IOS is not a need).
This project have to be open, and I want to be as close to standards as possibles. I know a little about both Cordova and Mozilla Open Web App, and both seems to be really great on this aspects.
So, my question is : Which, between Mozilla Open Web App and Cordova, seams the closest to the future standards of web apps, and which can really respond to the need of running the app as well online and offline.
PhoneGap is a good choice if you target only mobile devices: you would have been able to use their APIs to create Firefox OS as Android applications. Since you need to target all desktops, Mozilla Open Web App is the choice.
By creating a Firefox OS applications, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you will of course have an application running on Firefox, but you will also be able to run it on Android if you have Firefox installed. Last, but not least, you will be able to make the application run on the desktop, again, by having Firefox installed.
As for the offline support on your application, you can either use IndexedDB or create a packaged app.
When it comes to the Web Standards, Firefox OS is using the standard you know. On top of that, WebAPI is available, so you can access to the hardware, and create a better experience with the platform. Those APIs are not part of the standard right now, but we are working with the W3C to make that happens. Note that if the standard change to something we did not have, we will make the change to be standard compliant.
P.S.: Full disclosure, I'm working for Mozilla.
To put it bluntly, do Mobile Chrome Apps have anything to do with chrome at all? After all, it seems reasonable to expect that as it has Chrome in the name. This question stems from the fact that as I was porting my 'chrome based mobile app' (which does not run in the 'Browser'), I got a huge string of weird errors and for the first couple of hours I had no idea what was happening.
NOTE: This question is out of date, Mobile Chrome apps now works differently as outlined in the edit section of the main answer:
By default, Chrome Apps for Mobile leverage an embeddable Chromium WebView provided by the Crosswalk project by default, which has both advantages and some tradeoffs.
(Note: I work on the (very small) team at Google building the open source project to bring Chrome Apps to Mobile)
First, I’ll paste the description of Chrome Apps, right from the top of the docs:
“Chrome Apps deliver an experience as capable as a native app, but as safe as a web page. Just like web apps, Chrome Apps are written in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. But Chrome Apps look and behave like native apps, and they have native-like capabilities that are much more powerful than those available to web apps.
Chrome Apps have access to Chrome APIs and services not available to traditional web sites. You can build powerful apps that interact with network and hardware devices, media tools, and much more.”
Next, I’ll paste the description of Chrome Apps for Mobile, right from the top of our README.md:
“You can run your Chrome Apps on Android and iOS via a toolchain based on Apache Cordova, an open source mobile development framework for building mobile apps with native capabilities using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Apache Cordova wraps your application's web code with a native application shell and allows you to distribute your hybrid web app via Google Play and/or the Apple App Store. To use Apache Cordova with an existing Chrome App, you use the cca (c ordova c hrome a pp) command-line tool.”
Now to answer your question: “To put it bluntly, do Mobile Chrome Apps have anything to do with chrome at all? After all, it seems reasonable to expect that as it has Chrome in the name.”
Blunt Answer:
No, they don’t run on Chrome in the same sense that they do on desktop. However, using cca they can run on Mobile in ways that are most appropriate for those platforms, and we do use the Chrome Renderer whenever/however we can.
EDIT as of July 2014: We now run apps inside the Crosswalk WebView on every version of Android (currently based on Chrome 36, but that will change with time). I described this approach at the bottom of this original answer, but some of the details about system webviews -- while still accurate -- no longer really apply to Chrome Apps for Mobile. You can read more about this on our main github page.
Sorry for the naming confusion. I do see why it is reasonable to assume what you did. The “Chrome” in “Chrome Apps for Mobile” refers specifically to the source application type, not to the target runtime type. We try to document that best we can -- Do you have a suggestion for a simple yet less confusing title?
Less-Blunt Answer:
Chrome Apps for Mobile is an open source project to build a tool to support wrapping existing Chrome Apps into Hybrid Mobile Apps, leveraging Apache Cordova.
That is, cca creates a 100% real Android/iOS app, like any other, built using the respective Mobile SDK. Additionally, for your benefit and convenience, we create an app shell that uses the system WebView component to display and run your application content. We read your application manifest, we simulate the Chrome App lifecycle, we run your background scripts, open chrome app windows, and implement many of the Chrome Apps device apis. We’ve bundled all this work up into one toolkit which we call cca. We also contribute a lot of patches to core cordova to generally make all hybrid apps on Android/iOS better.
Now, the default system WebView’s are as follows:
iOS: Mobile Safari WebKit based. Lots of web-platform overlap with Chrome, but not exact and diverging slowly.
Android 4.3 or older: Legacy Android WebView. Dated and occasionally buggy, but still fairly performant on certain tasks.
Android 4.4: Chrome based WebView. This initial release brought a slew of modern web apis, and enabled remote web inspector. However, it also introduced some regressions, is stuck at Chrome 30, and didn't bring all features, such as WebGL and WebRTC.
Android Future: Since the first launch of Chrome based WebView, it was announced that work is ongoing to make the WebView auto-update just like the Chrome Browser does.
So, on Android 4.4 we already use a real Chromium renderer to turn your Chrome App into pixels on screen. On iOS, the WebView is quite modern and performant and many apps should run fine. For Android Legacy WebView, its hit and miss. But there is hope...
Excitingly, a significant portion of our recent work on cordova-android has been on bundling a tip-of-tree chromium based “webview” alongside your app, thanks to the Intel Crosswalk project. This would mean you ship your app to the Play Store together with your very own modern build of Chromium webview. Best yet, it will work all the way back to Android 4.0. Expect announcements on how to try it yourself in the next month or so!
Finally, while there are some downsides, it's important to note the benefits of our approach:
By running as a real Android/iOS hybrid app, you can write your own cordova plugins to run native Android/iOS code to augment your application should you find the need to do so.
Your app distributes using the app store, with user reviews, auto-updates, and monetization.
Your app has an icon on the users' home screen, and is in the app switcher, etc.
Most importantly: You don't have to wait for the future! Get started today using cca, and run your Chrome Apps on iOS and Android using the webviews currently available, and soon to be improved.
NO on android 4.3-, Mobile chrome apps run in the standard Browser, not in Chrome. The chrome part in the name can be considered either a lie or just referring to the part that it supports a few API's that are supported by real Chrome Apps as well.
Yes, but NO on android 4.4+, as the standard android.webkit.WebView has been updated to Chrome 30, but will at least for the moment NOT get the same updates as Chrome and thus end up in the same situation as now where Chrome will run applications differently from the android.webkit.WebView again. Technically the answer is still yes to the question: 'Does it run in chrome', but for all practical means the answer is a clear no (as we're at version 34-36 already now).
This can be found out by either investigating the User Agent or checking for specific support for certain functions. For the user agent mobile chrome apps will return something along the lines of
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.2.2; en-gb; ZP998 Build/JDQ39) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30
And chrome will return
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.2.2; ZP998 Build/JDQ39) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.114 Mobile Safari/537.36
And the browser
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.2.2; en-gb; ZP998 Build/JDQ39) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30
The expected behaviour of the mobile Chrome apps should have been that the Chrome browser itself would expose an API which they would have used, but instead they really did nothing more than fork cordova and be done with it. On iOS this would have made sense, as that's how the 'Chrome' browser works there as well, but in both cases it should run the same code as Chrome which at the moment of speaking it does not.
The Chrome Apps platform defines a set of APIs and a runtime model to make it easy to use web technology to write apps that have native capabilities. You write an app that runs on that platform, and we (the Chrome team at Google) implement the platform on different host architectures. It's "Chrome" in the sense that the Chrome browser, Chromecast, ChromeOS, and Chromebooks are all under the Chrome brand. Chrome does not necessarily mean Chrome web browser.
Yes, on desktop, the Chrome browser happens to be the same executable that implements the Chrome Apps runtime. But to the greatest extent possible, we try to make that just a detail of implementation. A user can use Firefox or Internet Explorer as their default web browser, and never use the Chrome browser, but still use Chrome Apps.
As David Mulder says, Cordova apps (Mobile Chrome Apps) don't use the Chrome browser as their runtime on either iOS or Android. Each Cordova app is its own executable. But where possible, they'll use the Chrome Webview component, so that the inevitable compatibility nits among different webviews are minimized for a given Chrome App.
Mulder's answer makes no sense to me, and I have no idea what he means when it refers to the user agent. What Cordova does for Chrome Apps is provide the same Chrome App APIs (not all are implemented yet) on Android and iOS, but the resulting app is a native Android or iOS app, which has nothing whatsoever to do with any browser, just as all other Android or iOS apps do not.
In short, the answer is "no."
(The technology does not allow a Chrome App to run on Andoid or iOS. Rather, given the source code of that app, you can build it for those platforms, resulting in a new binary, native app.)
We've developed a Hybrid App for Android Mobiles. We wanted it to be compatible with Windows and so we used Adobe PhoneGap Build to generate .XAP package from the existing Source Code.
We're are sure that this .XAP package could be easily deployed into a Windows Mobile Phone using the Deployment Tool/ publishing to Windows Phone Store.
But how about targeting a Windows Tablets/ Surface Mobiles. Do they use the same package(.XAP) type?
My Colleague Suggested that We need to develop a Native App from the scratch to Target the Windows Tablets/Surface which would be even compatible with Windows8 PCs/Laptops.
This breaks the whole ides of Hybrid. But my view is that Why can't we use the same source code (in HTML5,CSS3,JS,JQuery,JQUeryMobile) to generate the package compatible with Windows Tablets/ Surface. If so how? If not Why?
Also let me know if Windows Tablets and Windows Phone platforms are completely different.
Disclaimer: I'm not a phone developer, just a guy with some knowledge I've picked up on this subject.
Firstly, by "Windows Tablets" I imagine you're referring to the Windows RT OS? Or are you referring to Windows 8/8.1 apps in the Store?
In any case, Windows Phone 8 / Windows RT apps can all be developed using a front-end stack (HTML/CSS/Javascript).
You can easily create apps for Windows and Windows Phone devices from a single project, using the language you prefer.
source: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/getstarted
The moral of the story is that you can develop apps for Windows/Windows Phone/RT using a variety of different languages, including JS with HTML/CSS. It might be a good idea to read that link and check out some of the samples/tutorials there, since some of them appear to directly apply to your situation.
Hope that helps.