It should soon be easier to choose whether links open in apps or web apps on your Chromebook

According to C2 Productions on Twitter, Google is implementing a new means for deciding whether a link you click will open in an Android App or a web application on your Chromebook! This is fantastic news, if you ask me, especially as someone who is extremely picky about how clean and organized my workflow and app launcher are from day to day.

As you can see in the image below, C2 has opened a YouTube video in the browser and is being prompted at the top-right of the Omnibox via a YouTube app icon. The dialogue box that pops up says “Open in app”, followed by “Select an app on your Chromebook to open this link”. The two options are simply YouTube icons with no way to differentiate them from one another, but C2 implies that one is from the Google Play Store and the other has been created via the ‘Create a shortcut’ option from the browser’s vertical three dots menu.

This may even be appearing on Desktop Chrome for Windows, but it appears that the description that mentions “Chromebook” is tailored depending on whether or not you open a link this way on your ChromeOS device. This is currently appearing on ChromeOS Canary and will roll out to the Stable channel at some point, but you may need to be patient.

My hope is that Google makes it easier to tell the difference between apps and PWAs in this dialogue window, even if it’s just a small web app indicator of some sort. In the past, Google marked websites that were turned into icons with a small grey Chrome browser icon but removed it just last year.

Luckily, you can tell Chrome to remember your choice when it comes to opening links so that this becomes a one-time process for each link source. That means that if you open a link from YouTube again – no matter where that link originates – it will open in the app or web app you’ve specified. However, if you open a Facebook or Twitter link, for example, and have both types of app installed for that site, you’ll have to tell it what to do yet again.

My only problem with this is that these settings are saved on your device and are not cloud synced. Maybe one day these sorts of things will be sent to your Google Account in the cloud and sent back down to your Chromebook when you sign into the same or a new device. I’m not holding my breath though because these little polish or quality of life updates are not really a priority for Google until years after the fact.