ChromeOS is Getting a New App Mall

Google quietly launched a new app discovery experience for ChromeOS called App Mall that links to high-quality web and Android apps. This is an interesting coincidence: I just wrote about the complexity of choosing the right app type in ChromeOS yesterday, and the App Mall, while limited in scope, seems to at least partially address this issue.

Since it’s a web app, the ChromeOS App Mall can be viewed with any web browser. It’s straightforward enough, with a Home view that lists recommended apps and games, dedicated Apps and Games views, and a Play Store view that displays the web version of the Google Play Store.

This is all very straightforward, but there is one surprise lurking inside. For some of the apps that have both web and Android versions, Google lists both with a “Choose option” button, and then it recommends one or the other. Sometimes.

This is the bit that partially addresses the issue I raised yesterday, and it’s particularly interesting to me that Google doesn’t always recommend the web app version as you might expect. For some apps, like Hulu, it recommends the Android app over the web app.

In other cases, Google has no recommendation. For example, Facebook Messenger just displays separate download links for the web and Android app versions. And in some cases, only one app type is listed, even when both exist.

I’m curious if Google will ever explain how it chooses one app type over the other, but this app hasn’t formally launched yet, so we’ll have to wait and see.