ungoogled-chromium-android

Please see CHANGELOG for latest updates.

A lightweight approach to removing Google web service dependency

Note: this is an Android build.

Help is welcome!

For more information on ungoogled-chromium, please visit the original repo: ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium.

Content Overview

• Objectives
• Differences from ungoogled-chromium
• Limitations
• Platforms and Versions
• Building Instructions
• Reporting and Contributing
• Extensions
• Credits
• Related Projects
• License

Objectives

In descending order of significance (i.e. most important objective first):

1. ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services.
2. ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible. Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentially a drop-in replacement for Chromium.
3. ungoogled-chromium features tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency. However, almost all of these features must be manually activated or enabled. For more details, see Feature Overview.

Differences from ungoogled-chromium

These are the differences between a Linux build of ungoogled-chromium and ungoogled-chromium-android.

• Disable/Remove Android specific functionalities:
  • Contextual search
  • Lite mode
  • Offline indicator
  • Prefetch
  • Home page links
  • Unnecessary account permissions
• Android specific enhancements:
  • Add Startpage.com and Qwant.com as search engine options
  • Add new folder button in bookmark manager
  • Add back flags to enable deprecated TLS warnings
  • Add flag to enable update notifications (disabled by default and will only send a single GET request to my server periodically)
  • Add flags to always send save-data flag in header
  • Add flags to force tablet UI and desktop mode
  • Add flag to disable WebRTC. This flag is enabled by default.
• Borrowed from Bromite:
  • Always incognito mode
  • Bookmark import/export options
  • Clear open tabs between sessions
  • Disable DRM media preprovisioning which leaks connections
  • DNS-over-https by default
  • Exit menu item
  • Proxy configuration
  • WebGL flag
• Borrowed from Vanadium:
  • Disable seed-based field trials
  • Disable media router
  • Disable metrics
  • Enable user-agent freeze
  • Enable split cache, partitioning connections, strict site isolation
  • Various compiling time enhancements
• All Google play and Google service related blobs are removed. This includes Firebase, GCM (Google Cloud Messaging), GMS (Google Mobile Services) and bridge to Google Play.
• Releases are built for arm, arm64 and x86. There is no x86_64 build.

Limitations

The enhancements included in ungoogled-chromium are not to be considered useful for journalists, people living in countries with freedom limitations, and those who are facing government-level adversaries. Please look at tools specifically developed for these purposes, for example Tor Browser in such cases.

Platforms and Versions

Pre-built apks are named as {BUILD_TARGET}_{CPU_ARCH}.apk, where:

• {BUILD_TARGET} is one of ChromeModernPublic, Trichrome, SystemWebview.
  • ChromeModernPublic is for API >= 21 (Android 5.0) and only contains the browser.
  • Trichrome is for API >= 29 (Android 10) and only contains the browser. Note: Trichrome has two apks, you need to install both for ungoogled-chromium to work.
  • SystemWebview is for >= API 21 (Android 5.0) and only contains the webview.
• {CPU_ARCH} is one of x86, arm (armeabi-v7a), arm64 (arm64-v8a).
• Please also read this important note about Webview on Android N-P.
• The Bromite Wiki can also be helpful.

Building Instructions

This build is built using Android rebuilds instead of SDK/NDK binaries from Google.

• Clone this repository
• Make sure you have enough disk space and memory to build chromium
• enter repo directory and run ./build.sh.

Build time dependencies (package names as in Fedora 33. Other distributions may have different package names):

For a more customized building process, see building instructions from the original repo.

Reporting and Contributing

• For reporting issues and contacting, see SUPPORT
• Bug reports and code contributions are welcomed.

Extensions

The extension support version has been discontinued. The last version is 88.0.4324.182. It will still be available for downloading, but no new version will be released.

The extension patches can be found at chromium-android-extension. Anyone interested is welcomed to fork and keeps working on it.

Credits

• The Chromium Project
• ungoogled-chromium
• xsmile's fork
• Bromite
• Kiwi Browser
• dvalter's patches

Related Projects

• Bromite (Another build for Android. Has some own features.)

License

See LICENSE.