I'm in the process of porting an application to ChromeOS with the requirement that it should look and feel as native as possible. This means in particular that it should allow things such as multi-monitor support and USB support.
One possibility would be to implement it as a web application (since we have already a web client), but in this case I would need to add support for native features (again, multi-monitor support and USB device access), so I wonder what needs to be done in this case. My wild guess as a ChromeOS developer newbie is that I would need to extend the code with ChromeOS JavaScript features, and I don't know if this is possible.
Another possible approach would be to write an Android application, since I see that ChromeOS added support for Android applications (in this case I would have to write the code from scratch).
Finally, another option would be to write native code, which could be possible for example relying on a Crouton development environment, and reuse the code of a native C application.
What approach would you recommend to build a ChromeOS application starting from a web application or from a native one?
What approach would guarantee access to native features (multi-monitor support and USB)?
I discovered two APIs which should help with multi-monitor support:
The system.display API allows one to discover and monitor the current monitor layout, while the windows API allows one to create several windows in the same application. By combining these ones I should be able to create a window for each monitor in case I go with the chrome implementation route.
Given that I already have a native implementation for Linux, Crostini (as opposed to Crouton) is also very appealing since it provides a deeper level of integration with virtually no changes to the code and no need to maintain two different versions of the web client, with the only downside that it requires the user to create a Linux environment and manually install the application, also it is not supported on all chromebook devices and on many it will be never supported.
I still need to check what is the performance overhead. Also the level of integration with USB I/O might be higher than the one achievable by using the chrome API.