Google has open-sourced Chrome for iOS

After years of being completely separated from the rest of the Chromium project, Google has merged Chrome for iOS into the open-source repository it uses for Chrome on other platforms. The move comes with quite a bit of work on the backend as Apple's constraints on the iOS platform require Chrome for iOS to be built on WebKit rather than Google's own Blink rendering engine.

Thanks to a bunch of hard work, all of those hurdles have been overcome and there's a full upstream flow of the Chrome for iOS code into Chromium. Google says that development speed will also improve now that all of the tests done on Chrome for iOS will simply be part of the larger Chromium community.

If you're the sort of person who likes to check out the open-source code for massive projects like Chromium, you can do so now and see the inclusion of the iOS code as well. You can even compile the iOS version of Chromium on your own.

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Andrew Martonik

Andrew was an Executive Editor, U.S. at Android Central between 2012 and 2020.