Google Chrome Store to take on Apple iTunes

Google’s Chrome browser will soon sport its very own app store, seems to be a direct competition with Apple’s iTunes App Store for iPhone users.Google showed off a preview of the Google Chrome Store during the opening keynote at its Google I/O 2010 developer conference. The final version will appear in a release of the developer build of the Chrome browser in the near future, Google vice president for product management Sundar Pichai said. It will also be natively supported on Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS targetted at netbooks.

The store integrates the existing large thumbnails used on the New Tab page in Google Chrome with Google’s Checkout technology to allow people to acquire  HTML5-based applications. While Apple has recently been making headlines for its refusal to support Flash on its devices, Google is taking a much more positive view of the Adobe technology. Apps in the Chrome Web store can be built on standard web technologies, including Flash, and we will support them all in the Chrome Web store.

The problem we could see is that rival browsers such as Firefox may not support the tabbed interface for managing applications. The store will support 40 languages and be available in more than 70 countries.