Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Android KitKat ships without browser app. OEMs have to license Chrome

unwiredview.com

98 pointscpeterso64 comments

This is fud. Browser is still in AOSP. Pretty sure this is it here:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Brow...

Obviously you can create the gui for a browser to access the webkit renderer if you didnt want this.

Anyway, this is meaningless. No one ships commercial phones without the Play store and Chrome will be just another app bundled with the deal.

Yes, the truth is that the AOSP Browser is now abandonware - Google have stopped developing it in favour of Chrome, and likely won't accept non-security patches for it.

I don't think this matters much anyway. Firefox is a more than capable browser. Possibly better than Chrome on Android. It's certainly smoother.

The AOSP Browser uses the system webview, and the webview is now chromium-based and continues to be updated. So it's only abandonware in the sense that the UI didn't change with the latest release.

Exactly, the flip side of that is that the chromium engine, which used to be available for Android only as a part of the GMS app suite (with a lagging open source release that basically no one knew how to build), is now a first class part of the open source platform.

Honestly having "Chrome" be a proprietary blob is still dumb, but this situation is IMHO better than what we had for Jellybean. Now all apps (be they "browsers" or not) have access for the first-class browser engine. The bits of Chrome not part of chromium don't really interest me much.

Also, the Open Handset Alliance terms may prohibit OEMs from replacing Chrome with, say Firefox.

From http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

>Any OEM hoping to license Google Apps will need to pass Google's "compatibility" tests in order to be eligible. Compatibility ensures that all the apps in the Play Store will run on your device. And to Google, "compatibility" is also a fluid concept that an Android engineer once internally described as "a club to make [OEMs] do what we want." While Google now has automated tools that will test your device's "compatibility," getting a Google apps license still requires a company to privately e-mail Google and "kiss the ring" so to speak. Most of this is done through backroom agreements and secret contracts, so the majority of the information we have comes from public spats and/or lawsuits between Google and potential Android deserters (see: Acer).

>Another point of control is that the Google apps are all licensed as a single bundle. So if you want Gmail and Maps, you also need to take Google Play Services, Google+, and whatever else Google feels like adding to the package. A company called Skyhook found this out the hard way when it tried to develop a competing location service for Android. Switching to Skyhook's service meant Google would not be able to collect location data from users. This was bad for Google, so Skyhook was declared "incompatible." OEMs that wanted the Google Apps were not allowed to use them. Skyhook sued, and the lawsuit is still pending.

They would certainly prohibit them "replacing" Chrome with FireFox, but the suggestion that they would stop an OEM shipping an alternative browser on a phone is such a ridiculous piece of FUD it's laughable.

Mmm. I'm sorry, but how is "prohibiting them to replace Chrome with Firefox" compatible with "not stopping OEM shipping alternative browser" ?

because "not stopping OEMs from shipping an alternative browser" is what they're doing now, and "prohibiting them to replace chrome with firefox" is the theoretical evil they could technically do if they choose to in the future, not actually happening now, and probably will never happen.

This whole thread is so full of FUD. Google is not blocking firefox. There's a whole bunch of green-named people who have decided to sign up for an account and pretend that google is going to block firefox. There is no evidence that google is even considering this, and no valid arguments as to why google might want to do it. it's bullshit.

He's saying they could ship Firefox in addition to Chrome, just not make Firefox the default browser as shipped (user would still be able to change defaults themselves) or ship only Firefox, with no Chrome installed.

>Also, the Open Handset Alliance terms may prohibit OEMs from replacing Chrome with, say Firefox.

Any link to that "prohibition" or it is just speculation?

So much for an "open" handset alliance. What a misnomer :(

Large releases in the US come with the Play Store, but there are tons of lesser-known devices, especially in countries like China, that do not.

This seems a bit odd to me. The browser is still in the AOSP source (platform/packages/apps/Browser) and has 4.4_r1.2 tags. It was also included in a self-built rom for my Nexus 4 without doing anything to explicitly include it.

Even if google doesn't ship a browser in the source they provide to OEM's, the source for the AOSP browser is still readily available and trivial to add to the build.

If only there was a free, completely open source browser with more than 4.5 stars in the Google Play store which could be bundled without any business deals...

Bonus points for a cool project codename like Fennec.

Firefox for Android hasn't been called Fennec for a long time :)

They said "codename", to be fair.

Well, I'd say one advantage of the "store" model is that you don't need a browser to download a new browser (well, in the back it probably has a lot of Webviews, still)

I think I'm going to make a bet against myself. I have a feeling that in 2-3 years' time the play store app will be phased out and integrated with Chrome.

From thereon, if a vendor wants to call their device an Android[tm], they'll have no choice but to ship a browser they no longer control in order to have access to Android app arketplace. I'm not sure if this is laying groundwork for a pre-emptive strike against competing marketplaces or just an attempt to unify the browser experience for all future Androids.

Could be both. They are not mutually exclusive.

ChromeOS on Android on Linux?

If only there wasn't an agreement prohibiting such replacements.

Bonus points for calling it the "Open" Handset Alliance agreement.

http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

please stop spreading this as though it were fact. The OHA terms don't prevent you from shipping an alternative browser. They could if google wanted to, but they currently don't.

And the only carrot has to enforce compliance with the OHA is the google apps suite including chrome. If you don't want chrome and the other google apps, you don't have to comply with their compatibility tests.

Then don't sign the agreement? You can still use Android on your products.

It works! The lack of an agreement between Amazon and Google has yet to be a hindrance on my new Kindle Fire. All but one of the apps I wanted is in Amazon's store, and that one app was available as an .apk.

That doesn't help companies like Skyhook(and Mozilla if Firefox too is banned by the agreement) because almost all OEMs are current members who are bound to the agreement:

HTC

Sony

Samsung Electronics

ASUSTek

Garmin

Huawei Technologies

Sony Mobile Communications (joined as Sony Ericsson)

Toshiba

Acer

ZTE Corporation

Alcatel Mobile Phones

Compal Communications

Dell

Foxconn

Haier

Kyocera

Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology Ltd.

NEC

Sharp Corporation

Saygus Corporation

Care to guess the marketshare of Android handsets not shipped by one of the above?

More and more things are being moved into Google Apps with each Android release. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

Anyway, I don't begrudge Google doing this, I only have an issue with the bastardization of the word "open". AOSP and Android are very different, and when people say Android is open, they actually mean AOSP is open, since Android as shipped on devices is very different and contains a lot of proprietary things.

>If only there wasn't an agreement prohibiting such replacements.

Exactly what agreement?

Speaking solely as a web developer: good riddance, the pre-KitKat stock Android browser is a piece of shit. It relies on an old fork of Webkit that has none of the features of the modern web, no GPU support, and a lot of outright bugs (like it would flip back to the first frame of a CSS3 animation right before the animation completes, creating an ugly flicker).

Without this change we'd be left with Android Browser & clones as the IE6 of the mobile web. I'm hoping all the OEMs build their own browsers off the Chromium WebView that ships in KitKat; then at least we only have to worry about Chromium and Mobile Safari.

But speaking as an Android user, Android Chrome is a slow piece of crap, (with that horrible text resizing thing going on) while the stock browser actually works.

I've been using Android Chrome as a user since it was in beta; it's been my default browser for at least a year now. I had far more problems with Android Browser than Android Chrome.

(They are working on speed though; not much attention has been paid to performance optimizations besides using the GPU for animations.)

> It relies on an old fork of Webkit that has none of the features of the modern web, no GPU support, and a lot of outright bugs

That's really not true. It's an old version of Webkit NOW, yes, but it wasn't when it was still being updated all the way up to Android 4.0. And it absolutely has GPU support - it's had GPU accelerated compositing for CSS 3D transforms, fixed position elements, and scrollable divs since 3.0. It had all that before Chrome did.

In fact Chrome's GPU & rendering architecture today matches what Android Browser has had since 4.1. Chrome had to catch up to Android Browser in many respects.

> I'm hoping all the OEMs build their own browsers off the Chromium WebView that ships in KitKat

Chromium WebView is a requirement. Unless OEMs decide to start maintaining their own webkit forks (something they have not done so far), there will be nothing else but Chromium on Android from 4.4 onwards.

Hey, some of us use Firefox.

...which at least follows web standards fairly closely. Firefox is nearly as quick as Chrome at keeping up with the latest and greatest. Android Browser hasn't been updated in years.

Plus, Firefox still supports Froyo and Gingerbread. Chrome only supports Ice Cream Sandwich and later. Android users with older phones have been abandoned by Google, but at least they can download a modern web browser.

Browser is still in AOSP, https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Brow...

Are the additional terms for licensing Chrome beyond what was already needed for OEMs to get the Play Store? Unless there are and they're onerous in particularly new way, this feels like a non-issue getting attention because the business agreements around Android are relatively public compared to other OSes.

>this feels like a non-issue getting attention because the business agreements around Android are relatively public compared to other OSes.

Are they? Where can we see them?

The page at [1] about the Open Handset Alliance contains a lot of noise about openness etc. but there are no details of the agreements or how much it actually costs for a Google apps license.

I remember everyone was surprised when Google forced Acer to pull phones based on Aliyun OS because of the OHA agreement, which IIRC, is under NDA and secrecy.

[1] http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_overview.html

What has to do OHA with Google Apps?

One thing that isn't in the article: Chrome for Android is proprietary software. Yes it uses the chromium project as an engine, but all the UI bits are proprietary.

This leads to ridiculous procedures if you want to recompile libchromeview.so and replace it in your app: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/AndroidBuildInstructi...

All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead.

> All the more reason for OEMs to start shipping with Firefox instead.

I would love it if OEMs started to do this.

Unfortunately, I bet that most OEMs will just license Chrome, and if they decide not to do that, my money's on them creating half-assed proprietary browsers built around WebView before they turn to Firefox.

Which is a shame, because Firefox for Android is young, but shows great promise.

> if they decide not to do that, my money's on them creating half-assed proprietary browsers built around WebView

All of the major OEMs have already done that. They've been shipping their own browsers built on top of webview for years now. The only devices that ever saw Google's/AOSP's Browser were Nexus devices and those running custom ROMs.

Being limited to WebView isn't a problem anyway - that's all the old Browser used. It's "just" a UI on top of WebView. Just like the majority of browsers in the play store are "just" different UIs on top of WebView.

that part of the comment was nonsense. they can compile the stock browser just fine.

i bet all that means is that they removed dependency on the stock browser from the base system. which is welcome for barebones images that want only one browser that is not the stock one.

The latter is still fine as the Android team is apparently working on a way of updating the webview without upgrading the device OS. So even the halfbaked browsers can still benefit from speed and security improvements

Firefox for Android is slower and has more bugs than Chrome for Android, but I use it and love it solely for the add-on support. LastPass on mobile devices sucked until I found you can install the add-on in Firefox and use your normal browser. Adblock is nice for cutting down on mobile data use, too.

Don't know what are you talking about, Firefox on Android is currently the fastest browser there. Chrome is slower and buggier on every new update.

My main slowness/bug with Firefox for Android is the sluggish scrolling. When I move my finger, there's a small but noticeable delay before the page starts moving. I don't have this problem with Chrome on my Nexus 4.

Like I said, I prefer Firefox for its desktop-like features. But in my experience, Chrome has a faster response in the UI.

Sadly it's unlikely that this is how it would work. Most probably when you agree to license the Google Apps package it's an all-or-nothing affair, so if you want Play on your handset, I'm guessing you must take Chrome too.

Not only the browser in AOSP is based on chromium, but it's also used as the webview engine itself...

http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/introducing-chromium-powere...

as much as I despise Google for closing up a lot of bits of android, this doesn't seem much of an issue...

also: every OEM worth its salt should just build their android from the AOSP (or some fork)'s sources

Funny, this is exactly what Microsoft was sued over =) Good on Google for pre-emptively removing vendor lockin for browser choice.

Maybe they learned from Microsoft that is not good to ship a browser with an OS?

google is worse than microsoft when it comes to web control.

the only reason for this is so they can decouple the browser from the system, so they can update the browser faster.

or do you think they like that all those pre 4.1 devices (90%+) cant run their tracking-cookie-substitute or whatever?

Decoupling an app from the OS to update it faster is the reason they pulled the YouTube app from being shipped with iOS.

The YouTube app that was being shipped in iOS previously was written by Apple, not Google. Google's YouTube app was never bundled with iOS.

If that were the case, wouldn't they also not ship it with Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Calendar, etc.

They don't. OEMs have to license those as well. This is making the browser more like those services on Android, not less.

Before Chrome became the Android browser id led a dual life, as Chrome, Google's commercial product that includes some licensed IP, and Chromium, an open source project.

I expect that licensing Chrome in Android is necessary for the same reasons there are parallel projects and products for other platforms.

Chromium is a free software version of Chrome for PCs. Is there an Android version of Chromium? If so, wouldn't OEMs just ship that instead of licensing Chrome?

Sort of. Chromium is actually the base for Chrome, and that's true for Android as well. However while Chromium on PC has more or less the complete browser UI, the Chromium for Android does not. All the hard stuff is there in Chromium for Android - blink, V8, graphics, webgl, etc... - but the UI isn't.

In Android 4.4 the WebView sits on top of Chromium, so if an OEM really wanted they could continue to use their own browser skins that sit on top of WebView like they previously shipped and it will now magically use Chromium under the hood. So really there's no story here.

The browser that is included with Android 4.4's source code is Chromium. This is still available. I'm not really sure what the author is trying to say, but it seems like an inaccurate article to me.

Is Google making companies pay for software they offer as a free download in the Play store? How does that make any sense?

Companies also have to pay for the Play store.

There's no evidence that Google is charging for Chrome (at least in money...)

The play store is part of that software that they pay for.

It's the IE/Netscape lawsuit all over again.

Google is actually doing the opposite of what Microsoft did: they're unbundling the browser from the OS.

Which is not to say it's a good thing, just that it isn't the same at all.

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