Using the Postman Chrome App? Implications from the Recent Google Announcement

Kasey

August 23, 2016

Update: Native Mac, Windows, and Linux apps are now all available, with full Postman functionality

Last week, Google announced plans to end support for Chrome Apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux users, over the next two years. Chrome apps helped Postman enormously – being cross-platform, the Chrome app was key in our ability to reach the millions of developers who use Postman today. Of course, there have been challenges for any Chrome app to incorporate OS functions across Windows, OS X and Linux, requiring ongoing support. At Postman, we carefully follow issues on the Chromium tracker, and see the challenges in making Chrome apps work properly across these multiple operating systems. It appears from this recent announcement that Google had decided these challenges are too great to address going forward.

We know much of the Postman community currently uses our Chrome app, and will be affected by this upcoming change. Fortunately, Postman already has native Windows and Mac apps available via free download, and a Linux native app is planned for release in late 2016.

The Postman native apps provide the same features as the Chrome app, based on a complete platform for building, testing, documenting and sharing APIs, making your workflow faster and easier. In addition, the native Windows and Mac apps provide developers with seamless request capturing and cookie handling functionality. Users of the Postman Chrome app had to download the Postman Interceptor Chrome Extension to manage cookies and capture requests in the desktop browser; our native apps provide this functionality within the app itself.

The native Mac & Windows apps are free, of course, like the Chrome app. The Mac app is available for OS X Yosemite or later, and the Windows app is available both in 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64), for Windows 7 & later. You can read more about how to install the correct version here.

Transitioning to the native app is quite simple for Chrome app users – all you need do is sign into your Postman account after you download and start the new native app, and all your history and collections will be automatically synced.

We’re encouraging Postman Chrome users to transition to the the Mac or Windows app when convenient, and to the Linux app when available, by heading to https://www.postman.com/downloads/ and downloading the correct app. Going forward, we will be watching to see how Chrome OS app development proceeds, to make sure we provide the right tools for our community.