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The owner of Chrome could go to the manufactures of any non Apple phone and tablet and ask them royalties to ship Chrome with their phones. Maintenance releases included. Per unit royalty, flat, whatever they agree upon. The alternative would be Firefox or any other browser, which would have an incentive to follow suit. Or build their own browser. Samsung has one. They might leave the desktop browser free or as Microsoft for money. After all they would be developing the engine used by Edge. Again the alternative would be resuming the development of their own engine, starting with forking Blink.

The owner of Android could do the same. There is a long history of OS licensed to phone manufacturers. The incentive for manufacturers to keep using a common OS is probably much bigger than keep installing Chrome: nobody wants to sell phones without apps and nobody wants to pay developers to develop four or five versions of the same app. Think about home banking or games. Web apps might be enough and I very welcome that, but they are not enough for everything especially on low specs devices.



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