Building Apps for Amazon and Chrome App Stores with C3

In early May of this year, Ashley said:

Platforms like BB10, Tizen and Ubuntu Phone are pretty much completely dead by now, as far as I can tell.

The actual usage of export platforms is almost entirely shared between the exporters we already support, and the rest have vanishingly small usage. We'd like to trim dead or unused platforms from C3 where possible. I think we'll bring back the Chrome Web Store exporter because it had slightly less negligible usage and partly because it's pretty simple, but other than that I think it depends on user demand.

Is this likely to happen soon? The work to export to the Chrome Web Store shouldn't be that hard, and it looks like Chromebooks are still selling like hotcakes, especially to schools and students.

The Chrome Web Store looks very inviting, especially since you can create apps on a Chromebook. For $200 you can have a complete end-to-end development system. Create and Sell without ever leaving your one machine! Here's the Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps. And no, I don't work for Google. I don't work for anybody -- except me, and my boss is lazy!

Well apparently Chrome apps are being removed from all OSs other than Chrome OS, which firstly reduces the scope of the Chrome Web Store even further, and secondly sounds an awful lot like Google actually just want to remove it but are going to give Chrome OS longer to transition. Especially given that Chrome OS can now run Android apps and web apps are getting much better capabilities (e.g. C3 itself runs just fine on Chrome OS from the browser, there's little need for it to be a Chrome app), there's probably not much reason for Google to keep the Chrome Web Store around much longer. So I think it would largely be a waste of time to implement and maintain a Chrome Web Store exporter at this point, and would pointlessly encourage C3 users to publish to a deprecated platform.

It is hard not to be disappointed in Google. This recent article sums it up: https://www.fastcompany.com/3044119/its-time-for-google-to-clean-up-chromes-web-store. I'm still mad that they closed iGoogle and a lot of other stuff https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/03/top-10-services-google-killed-off/. And I'm really mad that they stopped all work on Chrome Dev Editor https://github.com/GoogleChrome/chromedeveditor, which was an easy HTML5-based way to create Chrome apps. Except for Chrome browser and Google Search and Gmail and Google Drive, I'm not real happy with the way Google spends their billions.

But there's still a tiny ray of hope for Chromebooks (which do seem to be selling well in the school arena) in terms of a migration path: https://developers.chrome.com/apps/migration. Am I right that these steps might work?

1. Create an app in Construct 3.

2. Export it to HTML5 or NW.js or Electron

3. Put it into the Chrome App Store

It looks like you can still just use this procedure to create a Chrome app: https://developer.chrome.com/apps/first_app. Just take the index.html that Construct 3 generates and use that.

So maybe Construct 3 doesn't need to do anything extra and if I add a bit of cruft around the edges, I can still put a Construct 3 game in the Chrome App Store. I think I'll try it.