Why Chrome not shipping with Android 4.4 might not be a bad thing

Maximiliano Firtman broke the news a couple days ago that Android 4.4 (Kit Kat) will not ship to manufacturers with a browser:

I had official confirmation: Android 4.4+ doesn’t ship with any browser, just the WebView. The emulator has it but not real devices (cont.)

— Maximiliano Firtman (@firt) November 20, 2013

(…) It’s up to each vendor to create a browser app using the WebView (such as Samsung) or to get license to preinstall Chrome.

— Maximiliano Firtman (@firt) November 20, 2013

At first blush, this seems like a bad thing especially for those of us who have been waiting so long for the Android browser to die and Chrome to take its place. However, I think this may actually be good news.

The first thing to keep in mind is that what ships to carriers and manufacturers is not the same thing as what ships to the store. Android doesn’t include Google Maps by default. If you want that on the phone you’re building, you have to license the Google apps services separately from Android’s open source code.

I attended the Mobile Summit during Google I/O earlier this year. One of the questions we asked was when will Chrome be the default browser for Android. The answer was that couldn’t say precisely because the handset manufacturer would have a say in the matter.

This has been one of Google’s biggest challenges with Android is the speed at which handset manufacturers adopt new versions of Android (if they ever do). Over the last year or so, Google has developed a strategy for addressing this problem.

Ron Amadeo wrote a great article for Ars Technica earlier this year that outlined how Google is now side-stepping the carriers and OEMs. In the article he describes how Google is using its Google Play Services which it licenses to OEMs as a way to keep applications on a frequent update cycle.

Google Play Services takes care of lower-level APIs and background services, and the other part of Google’s fragmentation takedown plan involves the Play Store. Google has been on a multi-year mission to decouple just about every non-system app from the OS for easy updating on the Play Store.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the question of Chrome. The slow pace of carrier and handset updates is the complete opposite of Chrome’s frequent release cycle. The Chrome team prides itself on the frequent releases and touts how they’re bringing that same release cycle to mobile.

If Google released Android 4.4 to carriers and handset manufacturers with Chrome installed, they would have no control over when Chrome is updated. By bundling it with Google services that the handset manufacturers sign up for and license, Google controls the app and how frequently it updates.

The big question is whether or not when a handset manufacturer signs up for Google services if Google forces the manufacturer to ship Chrome as the default browser. Because they dictate the terms of licensing of Google’s proprietary services and apps, I don’t see any reason why Google would put that condition on usage.

Yes, there is the potential that more devices will come out with browsers that aren’t using Chrome. But those are the Android-derived devices that don’t play in the Google apps space regardless. We’re talking about the Android devices in China or forks like the Amazon Kindle. It was unlikely they would use Chrome anyways so at least when they ship a browser, we’ll know it is something different.

But for end consumers and web developers, this seems like the best possible scenario. If you buy a phone that utilizes all the Google services we think of on Android (e.g., Google Maps, Gmail, Calendar, etc.), then you’ll get Chrome and I’m speculating here, but I suspect you get Chrome by default.

More importantly, you get real Chrome. The Chrome that updates every six weeks. And not a hobbled version of Chrome that would be limited by whims of the carriers and the manufacturers as to when it is updated.