Google has announced that it will launch what it’s calling the Chrome Web Store as a place for developers to showcase their various web-based applications.

The potential tie in certainly makes Chrome OS that bit more appealing

The idea of a web apps store is an interesting one, given that so very many web-based applications are either free or have free counterparts undercutting them. It’ll be interesting to see if Google app store style arrangement can tempt people into paying for web-based services they might not normally have considered. TechCrunch reports that, for the moment at least, Google says the store isn’t quite ready to be shown off, but there are still some very interesting questions raised by the idea of a Chrome Web Store.

Given Google’s push towards HTML5 and the rich applications it can deliver, this move is perhaps less surprising than it might otherwise have been, but it still has some very interesting ramifications indeed. For Google, this idea makes an awful lot of sense given its current direction. Google’s own near-entirely web-centric operating system, the much talked about Chrome OS, is set to arrive later this year, and seems to be absolutely crying out for something like this.

Having taken the chance to sit down and give Chrome OS a bash for a few hours, there’s relatively little to the OS itself beyond the browser. The idea with the web store could well be that users will be able to get to any services they might use the device to access through the web. While you can’t run an office suite, there are plenty of web-based office suites out there. It’s an interesting idea, but one that had many expressing concern.

With a web-based app store available for Chrome, Google would certainly have gone some way towards offering a mitigating factor for just that kind of uncertainty. Now there is a centralised hub from which users can have a poke at the various applications available to them, something that could very much make all the difference with a product like Chrome OS.