Google Phasing Out "Chrome App" Support; MyEtherWallet Turmoil - Affects Ledger Wallet Users

Google appears to be making good on their promised gradual-and-long-announced phase-out of support for Google Chrome apps. The scuttlebutt is that not enough people are using them (reportedly, less than 1%) to make continuing to support them outside the Chrome OS worthwhile.

This presents an issue for users of Ledger hardware wallets, as the native apps on the wallet are currently updated only via the Ledger Manager Chrome app, though an update is coming to resolve this issue. Owing to the deprecated support for Chrome apps, this has caused some Ledger users problems recently in updating their wallets, and caused more users to hit the "memory fragmentation" issue, wherein installing and uninstalling many apps on the Ledger wallet can eat up disk space, forcing a system reset.

As for MyEtherWallet, I mentioned this tidbit in my previous post, but it is important enough that it bears repeating. It would appear that one of the "co-founders/owners" decided to unilaterally rebrand MyEtherWallet as "MyCrypto" - a move that has spooked both users and the "proper" public facing operator of MEW. This is "unofficial", and should be rolled back, but nevertheless this is what happened.

This is particularly important for owners of Ledger-brand hardware wallets, such as the Nano S, since MyEtherWallet is the only supported means for securing ERC20 tokens. If MEW becomes an insecure option, the list of coins/tokens supported by Ledger will be cut by a huge proportion.

Unfortunately, this comes at a bad time for Ledger, which I have otherwise considered the top hardware wallet option since the Trezor "private key extraction" issue. There have been sporadic reports of users having problems with bricked ledgers, and plenty of users have been having difficulty with updating Ledger apps since they rely on the aforementioned Google Chrome apps - a definite problem, since updates are often necessary to send coins. If you are locked out of updates, your coins are "stuck" on your ledger until you resolve the issue.

Unfiltered results, page 1, first search term I tried. Note the dates.

I'm not aware of any options better than the Ledger, and I still recommend it with some reservations, but take extra care when moving your coins, and remember that no single place can be entirely secure.

At least not until someone figures out how to etch private keys in "invisible" elvish script.

Possible substitutes available at TungstenAffinity (no affiliation).

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Sources: Reddit, Ledger, MacRumors.com, Google
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