How does Chrome side-load “store apps”?

Question

I have been tasked with writing a simple one-time-use Metro/windows store/modern UI (whatever you want to call it now) app for windows 8; it wouldn't be appropriate to try to get it into the store, because we only plan on deploying it to about 4 or 5 devices. I noticed that when I installed Chrome on the machine, it somehow managed to sneak a metro version of itself into my start menu.

I am not looking for a way to deploy a metro app to another machine, I can already do this a variety of ways (including add-appxpackage and via the remote debugger tools with visual studio 2012), I am only curious how Chrome managed to side-load a metro app, and what process they used.

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

There was no side-loading of a Windows App when Chrome was installed. Browsers get special treatment, and the default browser (and only the default browser) can act as a Windows Store app if it implements the appropriate functionality.

There is a downloadable white paper about how this works on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465413.aspx