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I didn't mean to nitpick. I couldn't tell from the comment if OP was referring to the technical achievements of the Chromium project or was referring to the end-user application (Chrome).

The technical achievements don't really matter as much as the value of having whatever 70/80% market share Chrome has. I'm not saying it's not impressive technically, just that they could've skinned Firefox and called it Chrome and put it on their google.com homepage and gotten a (multi)billion users as well in theory. As long as they could use it for the purposes of driving revenue, that would be a win as well, again in theory.

Same argument could be made for Android Open Source Project (AOSP) vs Android.

Google would not be revoking API keys for Chromium to nerf its functionality if this were not a real issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/mo60q5/psa_you_can_e...

I disagree. Chromium reinforces their position on the web.

They get to push whatever tech they want as a de facto standard because now the web is Chromium or WebKit (and maybe Gecko)

But by having Edge and all the other chromium variants, including electron, they get to define what web technology is.

30% on every transaction on the play store.

It's about ads

You forgot Android.

Is Android a win for Google? Does it make any money, lock in anyone to their proprietary hardware? No.

Android makes money because Google Play is effectively mandatory, even if it isn’t absolutely so.

That’s a huge staying power in multiple areas that let’s them keep a lead

Google Play store isn't mandatory in most places where Android is the most popular OS.

You forgot Ads.

(Fixed that for you…)

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