Google dropped quite the digital bombshell yesterday on the developer community, announcing that offline Chrome Apps could soon find their way to both Android and iOS devices (with a little help, of course).
The company launched a preview of a tool-chain for building native apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which will provide the foundation neccessary to turn Web apps into native apps. Essentially, devs can wrap their existing Chrome apps in a native shell and submit them to Google Play and Apple's App Store .
Google is using Apache Cordova, a set of device APIs's that allow mobile app developers to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.