The article's title is "The State of Desktop Applications in Node.js", and chrome applications do not let you run node.js on the local machine. If you can't run

The article's title is "The State of Desktop Applications in Node.js", and chrome applications do not let you run node.js on the local machine. If you can't run your own userland code on the machine and talk to hardware, then you can hardly call it a desktop app. Google wants to keep you locked in their sandbox.