is there another way to build Chrome Apps for Play Store?

[nelsonic]

Given that the Readme states "_no longer being actively developed_" ... is there a recommended other way of shipping a Chrome app for mobile?

[nelsonic]

@agrieve you appear to be working on this repo/project. would you recommend that people use it for new projects...?

[mmocny]

As per the top of the README:

The Chrome Apps for Mobile Toolchain is no longer being actively developed. We intend to keep it functional, but do not intend on adding any new features.

[nelsonic]

@mmocny thanks, I understand what is written in the README....
hence my question: is there an alternative way of packaging up Chrome Apps for iOS/Android...?
_or_ should a new project consider using mobile-chrome-apps for this purpose?

[mikecarr]

@mmocny Why is this no longer being developed?

[whitmer]

Hi, I recently transitioned my app from cca to plain jane cordova. In the repo commit where the README was changed, there was a comment basically saying most of what cca was trying to do is now available in cordova. Transitioning wasn't actually as hard as I was afraid it was going to be. I didn't to the best job documenting, but here's the gotchas I remember running into:

Instead of trying to migrate the app in-place, I made a brand new copy. In the old version I ran cca plugin list to get a list of plugins, and then added them one by one into the new app. I'm using a couple chrome plugins like cordova-plugin-chrome-apps-power that I just pulled over, I didn't worry about the core chrome libraries.

Add <script src='cordova.js'></script> to your html file

manifest.json and manifest.mobile.json are no longer useful, instead you need to manually add <icon> and <splash> tags to config.xml. I also had to add <access origin="*" /> instead of my custom CSP I was using before.

In /platforms/android I added a new file, build-extras.gradle that's just a one-liner that tells cordova to use the release keys I created for cca. This was the part I was most worried about, but it appears to be working correctly. Here's the file:

ext.cdvReleaseSigningPropertiesFile = '../../android-release-keys.properties'

I think I also had to manually copy some splash screen images to get them working.

To build apks (mostly) the same way as before, I run 4 lines of code (there's probably a way to do this without installing-uninstalling crosswalk, but I'm not that smart):

cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview
cordova build android --release -- --gradleArg=-PcdvBuildMultipleApks=true
cordova plugin remove cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview
cordova build android --release -- --gradleArg=-PcdvMinSdkVersion=21 --gradleArg=-PcdvBuildMultipleApks=false

There are probably a lot more elegant ways to handle this stuff, and I probably forgot something, but hopefully this is helpful. I just pushed my first version of the new app to the Play Store, and it looks like everything is jiving..

[newbsauce]

Many thanks whitmer, wish I had realized they had quit development earlier. ... been running to a lot of broken and missing features. Going to try to switch & learn plane cordova. Looks like chrome apps is dead :(