New Chromebooks will soon come with Meet and Chat apps preinstalled

Google’s Meet and Chat apps will soon come pre-installed on Chrome OS devices. The company is currently working on adding this functionality to Chrome OS, which will automatically install Progress Web Apps (PWAs) for both these services on new Chromebooks.

9to5Google recently spotted a merged commit on the Chromium Gerrit highlighting two new feature flags. The commit’s description reveals that the upcoming feature flags will preinstall “Meet and Chat PWAs on Chrome OS.” While users can currently install Android apps for Google Meet and Chat on most Chromebooks, pre-installing the Android apps would leave users with less storage space on their new Chromebooks right from the get-go. Therefore, Google is opting to install PWAs on Chrome OS devices, which should help prevent storage bloat.

As of now, it isn’t exactly clear how users would be able to change the aforementioned feature flags before setting up their Chromebooks. But we suspect that these flags will be enabled by default when the change goes into effect. Once the change is live, new Chrome OS devices and those that have been factory reset will have both apps preinstalled by default. In case you don’t use Google Meet and/or Chat, you’ll also get the option to uninstall the PWAs after you complete the setup process.

The report further reveals that the change is scheduled to be completed in time for Chrome OS 92, which is set to release late in July this year. However, it may not roll out with Chrome OS 92 if the developers hit a snag. If it does, new Chrome OS devices with Chrome OS 92 or those reset after the update should have Chat and Meet preinstalled. We’ll make sure to let you know as soon as the change is live on a stable Chrome OS release.

The post New Chromebooks will soon come with Meet and Chat apps preinstalled appeared first on xda-developers.