Since our announcement of the Chrome Web Store at Google I/O, our team has been hard at work preparing for our launch later this year. Today we’re making the first step towards this milestone by making available a developer preview of the Chrome Web Store.

Developers can now start uploading apps and experiment with packaging them, installing them in Chrome (using the latest Chrome dev channel) and integrating our payments and user authentication infrastructure.

To get started, take a look at our recently updated documentation for installable web apps, which explains how to prepare and package your apps. You should also review some additional documentation we just released on the store’s licensing and user authentication features.

To upload your app, you’ll need to use the upload flow of the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery .

When the Chrome Web Store launches, it will replace the current gallery, featuring a completely new design for users to discover great apps, extensions and themes all in one place. Until then, only you can see the apps you upload - they will not be visible to other visitors of the gallery during this developer preview. In the meantime, you can continue to use the gallery for publishing Chrome extensions and making them available to Chrome users.

We look forward to sharing more news about the store and its features over the next weeks. Meanwhile, we encourage you to subscribe to our developer discussion group for apps and look for updates on the Chromium blog.

Posted by Michael Noth, Software Engineer