What is the purpose of "link-only" Chrome apps?
There are a number of Chrome apps that seem to "duplicate" a website, by being just a shortcut to some web service.
Examples include, but are not limited to:
- Google Play Music
- Google Docs
- Google Calendar
- Google Maps
- Evernote
They don't seem to add or modify any features except for placing a shortcut on the "Apps" page.
Are there any reasons in installing these? What do they actually do?
This Google Developer page details the differences between hosted and packaged apps. In a nutshell, the main difference between them is that hosted apps are the ones that you are thinking of (ones that display a hosted website), and packaged apps are apps that are more self-contained (and include most if not all of their HTML and CSS files, or resources).
On the WrongPlanet forums, there was an interesting page that describes some of the reasons that a developer might make a hosted app. One reason that Apple in my Eye pointed out was:
It may technically be a website, but it functions indistinguishably from a normal non-web-browser app. Also, turning it into a shortcut strips away all the irrelevant browsers controls so that it looks like a normal app window.
NeantHumain continued on the discussion by saying:
Google Chrome apps are just web apps written in HTML5 that take advantage of new features like canvas, video, SVG, WebGL, and a bunch of new APIs that can be accessed through JavaScript for everything from geolocation to offline storage to web workers for a sort of multithreading.
So, in other words, it seems that more goes on in the background of a hosted app than just displaying a webpage. It allows the developer to extend the functionality of the website, and bypass some of the restrictions that a normal website may encounter.
Here's another reason:
Thanks to the mobile platforms, apps are "the next big thing" and to some users, it is more natural to search for an app on an appstore then to use a search engine to try to find a site that provides a web-app-like service. Some people are used to sites on a browser, others to apps on a screen.
From a non-technical point of view, wrapping your site on a chromeless window and making it look like an app (that, technically, it already is), and placing an entry on an app store, makes it easier to reach this audience. And it's much more cost-effective than developing an entire new app to different platforms.