[_urga]

Chrome Apps as far as I know can only be installed via a proprietary web store. You can't actually package them up as an exe or dmg to distribute yourself. They also don't have access to the system tray - they're not really first-class standalone desktop apps.

[bergie]

There is a PhoneGap wrapper for Chrome Apps, which you can probably eventually use also for packaging for the desktop OSs (even though now the focus is understandably on iOS and Android as Chrome apps work on the other platforms):

https://github.com/MobileChromeApps/mobile-chrome-apps