Google has revealed its Chrome Apps are headed to mobile devices.
Google first developed Chrome Web Apps for use in its browser and OS, and last year unveiled offline versions that act like native applications.
Those now work across all major desktop platforms, and Google is working on extending support to mobile devices.
Google has released an early developer preview of a toolchain based on open-source development framework Apache Cordova, which will allow native mobile apps to be built using web tools such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
"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," said software engineer Andrew Grieve, in a post on the Chromium blog.
"We provide a simple developer workflow for packaging a Chrome App natively for mobile platforms," he added. "You can run your Chrome App on a device or emulator using the command line or an IDE. Alternatively, you can use the Chrome Apps Developer Tool to run your app on an Android device without the need to install an IDE or the mobile platform’s SDK."
To help developers, key Chrome APIs such as sign-in, payments, push messaging, notifications and more are available to run natively on mobile.
While the toolchain is still in preview mode, sample apps are already available. It isn't clear when users will have Chrome Apps on their devices, however.
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