[_njyk]

The permissions are the Chromium ones.

There is literally no ads nor external SDK or ad-tech or whatever you are referring to (before there was AdMob, but it didn't make much money anyway).

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.kiwibro...

The way Kiwi makes money is by partnering with Bing / Yahoo.

You launch the browser, it starts with Bing or Yahoo (depending on your country), and... that's it.

Bing then pays back a revenue-share to the browser each time the user uses the search engine.

The same way that DuckDuckGo gets a revenue-share from Yahoo and Bing too when you use DuckDuckGo.

So, if you prefer Firefox and Google, or Kiwi and Bing, this is just a matter of choice.

[Springtime]

I've never tried Kiwi Browser but had similarly come across it while searching. The dev themselves refers to them as ads[1] (2022), though prior to being accepted properly into Bing's referral program Kiwi redirected all search queries through their own servers[2][3] (2021) (the original Kiwi repo's issues tab has been deleted since).

Tbf the dev always sounds reasonable in their responses but was a little off-putting initially so I kinda understand the GP's impression.

[1] https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next/issues/91#issuecomme...

[2] https://github.com/Tobi823/ffupdater/issues/35

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210605191305/https://github.co...

[mardifoufs]

Fyi, I'm pretty sure you're talking to kiwi's main dev :)

[mrguyorama]

Then the main dev is just wrong. That issue contains the exact words "Since then, now Kiwi Browser contains ads" as an explicit reason why they can't be in F-Droid.