The browser ecosystem, specifically on the mobile side, just got even smaller and less competitive with the announcement of the imminent shutting down of the open-source Kiwi browser.
It’s a story as old as the open source developing community: a small number of people, sometimes a single person, create and develop projects that later down the line become popular (Kiwi had a million downloads a month) – but over time prove too overwhelming to update and maintain (and often, impossible to monetize.)
But another part of that story is also a constant – since the code is open, it can be “reused.” In this case, the differentiating factor for Kiwi, and the original reason Arnaud Granal started developing it, is the extension support.
Google’s Chrome, which resolutely dominates the browser market both on the desktop and on devices, does not support extensions in mobile versions. However, Kiwi allowed users to include Chrome’s (desktop) extensions, making it popular among those in need of this functionality.
Given the open-source nature of the project, where Kiwi’s extensions code has ended up integrated seems a little surprising, from the “ideological” standpoint: it’s Microsoft’s Edge Canary.
But both these browsers are Chromium-based. And, for those who want extensions in their phone browsers but also want nothing to do with Microsoft, there are other options – like Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, Samsung Internet, etc.
Kiwi, meanwhile, can still be sideloaded (it has been removed from the Play Store), but since maintenance is discontinued it will receive no updates past this January, meaning that it will at some point become unusable through incompatibility with Android’s own updates. The Kiwi code (and the APK) is available on GitHub.
Those migrating to Edge Canary will find that user experience has suffered, as activating Kiwi’s extensions is somewhat involved. They will need to go into developer options (which is accomplished by tapping on the browser’s build number repeatedly) and then enable extensions by pasting their ID into the appropriate box.
A post on Reddit’s Android sub details the steps to achieve this.
