Following the Chrome for Android team's announcement
on Reddit AMA last week, Google has now uploaded the remaining Chrome
for Android source code to its Chromium repository. This would let any
developer build an open source browser based on Chrome for Android.
Chrome for Android now matches Chrome for desktop in terms of available
open-source code, letting anyone examine, modify, and compile the
project.
The
announcement came via Reddit where a Chrome for Android engineer
posted :
"After lots of work by Chrome for Android team and a huge change,
Chrome for Android is now almost entirely open source. It now matches
Chrome desktop and you can build a Chromium browser by building
chrome_public_apk target."
The "almost entirely" bit mentioned by the
engineer is referring to the licensing restrictions such as media codecs
and some native Google features.
The change to open source would
now let developers make Chromium-based browsers work on Android much
easily, or in other words, be able to customise Chrome for Android into
another product. This would also result in improved and new Android
browsers from third-party developers. The developers can also include
their own unique features in the browser.
For those unaware,
Chromium project is the set of code behind the Google Chrome browser,
which has always been open source. Some of the desktop browsers based on
Chromium are Flock, Opera, and Yandex.
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