This affected every single Chromium app I had installed. Signal is just one of them, which was easiest to spot.

Pocket, Kindle Cloud Reader, Duolingo, and Floating for YouTube are also gone.

Oh thank you rfz, I did not know that. Signal is the only chromium app that I am using. Are they making a stand alone app?

Evidently all Chrome apps are being phased out for Windows/Linux/Mac, so I can only assume they will. Not that Signal is a very feature-filled app or concept (it doesn't need to be), but it could definitely stand to be a bit more polished.

http://www.omgchrome.com/not-joke-google-killing-chrome-apps...

I hate this.

Chrome Apps are nicely sandboxed within Chrome's sandbox.

Now everyone is porting their stuff Electron, which has no sandbox.

Deprecating Chrome Apps is hurting users by making their systems less secure.

I am contemplating extracting the bits of chromium required to just make it an app container, so I can continue to run Chrome apps on the desktop. Since Chrome apps will still exist for Chromebooks it should keep working.

I fear that app developers would abandon their Chrome apps in favor of Electron.

Electron misses some core native application type features because they are not available to it. I can't see them coming to HTML5 either. It is just a colossal stuff up all round.

Seems to me that devs would only be smart (read: not in our favor or best interest) to go where the people are; what's the ChromeOS userbase compared to that of other OSes?

I don't care about ChromeOS, it's cross-platform, offline capable, secure and sandboxed applications I want. How much easier to distribute just the Chrome App engine to hundreds of varying Windows boxes, than the individual apps?

I was agreeing with you.

Ah, I didn't even know that this was happening.

Thanks for sharing!

Ah yeah, I completely forgot about this.