Back in March, news began to circulate about a new ‘App Mall’ coming for Chromebooks that would help simplify and unify app discovery in ChromeOS. With the ability for Chromebook users to get apps from a few different places in a few different ways, a single source for great Chromebook apps makes a lot of sense.
A few weeks back, that same ‘App Mall’ arrived in ChromeOS 125 Beta, and as you would expect, it is now here in the latest ChromeOS 125 update. The process to get it showing up on your Chromebook is very simple, and once you do, it could lead to the discovery of a few great tools or games you didn’t realize you needed before.
The first method you can use to try it out is to simply head to chrome://flags/#cros-mall, enable the flag, restart your device, and away you go. Once you get this done, you’ll now see a new logo down on your shelf that looks a bit like an app launcher, and that is the new ‘App Mall’.
While ChromeOS displays the title of the new ‘App Mall’ as “Get Apps and Games”, we’ll keep referring to it as ‘App Mall’ for the time being. I’m not sure whether or not it will get a proper name, but as it is not yet officially available, we’ll just wait an see on what the ChromeOS team chooses to do on the naming front.
Installing without a flag
The web app actually just lives on a URL (discover.apps.chrome) and without the flag enabled, you can just as easily go to that URL and click the install icon in the URL bar. The app is the same, and it even auto-pins to your shelf as well. Oddly enough, Google seems pretty married to this app discovery service, to the point that you can’t unpin it from the shelf even if you wanted to.
And in a lot of ways, I get that. For new users especially, finding apps is a core part of leveraging a new device, and this new ‘App Mall’ looks to be a great way to get that done. How Google chooses what apps get included here is a bit of a mystery for now, but I’m hopeful that any usable, great-on-big-screens apps get showcased here over time. Finding great apps on a Chromebook can be taxing: here’s hoping this new ‘App Mall’ makes it far less difficult.
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