You won’t be affected if you’re using the PWA from the Play Store
Thanks to the ease of use and lower-than-laptop prices we associate with all those great Chromebooks out there, the pandemic led to a spurt in the demand for these devices as students and professionals transitioned to remote work worldwide. Video conferencing tools like Zoom helped bridge the distances. The service even had a dedicated Google Chrome browser extension and a Chrome app optimized for Chromebooks. Sadly, though, Zoom doesn’t want to maintain the latter anymore.
Installing the Zoom app on a Chromebook and getting started is fairly cut and dried. However, the app lacks any feature outside the realm of basic functionality. So, you can join and start meetings, but don’t expect feature parity with the Zoom Android app or desktop app. Chromebook users reliant on the old Zoom app for Chromebooks are seeing a warning saying Zoom will not support the app come September 2022, 9to5Google reported in June. It will continue working, but Zoom won’t offer support and updates, making it unusable in due course.
The reason for the shutdown is outdated technology used to make the app. In 2020, Google announced plans to discontinue Chrome apps across operating systems, including Chrome OS. It stopped supporting their development in June 2021. In June 2022, Google stopped accepting new older Chrome app submissions on the Chrome Web Store. Existing listings are going down or being marked private. For this reason, the discontinued Zoom app has seen no updates recently.
Zoom’s official support documentation last updated May 4 recommends you switch to the new Zoom Progressive Web Application (PWA) for Chrome OS available for download on the Play Store. PWAs have been immensely popular, so it also has fewer missing features compared to the Android app, and you can find them all on the familiar user interface.
