Google is preparing one of its biggest updates to the Chrome browser on Android and the web, allowing developers to send push notifications to users without having a native application installed.

One of the big complaints from mobile web developers is the website doesn't have the same push notifications a native app can deliver. As a result, user engagement and retention for websites is rather low while on apps it's incredibly high.

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The new update should address some of these problems by allowing users to opt-in to push notifications from within the Chrome browser. These will come in the form of a normal push notification, but will only interact inside the Chrome browser.

Google already has a star-studded list of services working on push notifications, including Beyond the Rack, eBay, Facebook, FanSided, Pinterest, Product Hunt, and VICE News, Roost and Mobify.

There are plenty more expected to join Google Chrome's push notifications group in the next few months. The retention rate for push notifications on native applications alone is enough to turn web developers heads. They previously tried to bring users back to the site through email updates.

This may lead to services like Facebook and Twitter investing more time to polishing the mobile web client instead of purely focusing on the native app for iOS or Android. Given the push notifications only work on Android, it may not affect some app developers that have much higher usage on iOS.

Apple may look into push notifications on Safari with the new update to Google Chrome and possibly announce the update at WWDC 2015 in June. If Apple allows Safari these privileges, there is a high chance Google will be able to reverse engineer Chrome to work in a similar way, for iOS users that prefer Google's own web browser to Safari.

Google Chrome is the second largest web browser in terms of desktop users behind Internet Explorer. On mobile, it's another story with Chrome taking up almost all market share on Android and a good chunk of iOS market share.

Even though Safari is still the largest web browser on iOS, it's not exactly fair game considering it bundles Safari on iOS while forcing all other browsers to be installed by the user. That said, it is the same on Android but Google bundles its own web browser and forces other browsers to be downloaded.

TagsGoogle Chrome, push notifications