Google announced in May that they would be launching a web app store for their browser, Chrome, and Chrome OS. Today, the company announced that they are making a developer preview of the Chrome Web Store available. In a blog post, Google said "Developers can now start uploading apps and experiment with packaging them, installing them in Chrome...and integrating our payments and user authentication infrastructure". The store is reported to open up in October, but Google has neither confirmed nor denied that date.
The Chrome Web Store will eventually become a replacement for the Chrome extensions gallery, and will work quite like it as well. Available offerings in the store will be extensions, browser themes, and a new category, "installable web apps." These new web apps will work mostly like web apps currently do, however since they are integrated with the browser this could allow more OS incorporation than traditional web apps have had, or even Mozilla's Prism had.
Google's new store will feature both paid and free web applications. For developers who wish to charge, Google will take a five percent cut of all app sales. For reference, Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all app sales, so developers will jump for joy at that bit of information. Google will add a 30 cent per transaction fee and a one-time registration fee of $5 For Chrome Web Store's developer preview, anything that you create will only be visible to you. Everything will be hidden from other developers.
If you are a developer you can go ahead and try out the preview here. Google has a video detailing the store more here:
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