[JoseVigil]

The story behind the scene to my eyes is Google removing out of the box apps from Android to leave it PLAY dependent 100% if possible %200. This means that no other store like Amazon will be able to create a second store based on Android with a fresh environment out of the box. Google says is due to modularity I say due to market strategy. As a clear example (apart from the clear explanation of the article, great article BTW) a feature released today on KiKat 4.4 is that WebView is based on Chromium, this means the sole purpose of only Google using WebView. If I where Amazon I would be reconsidering having to develop all again for future releases or today make a fair deal with Google.

However this is not bad news at all for startups like myself because of two things.

1) Google will spend about a year or two on refactoring Android to fully cope with PLAY dependence allowing some spare "time" for third party ideas on features that can advance outside Google internal teams.

2) Third party developer a are now in equal position to compete with Google applications to win terrain into Android future tiny out of the box. Basically on future ex-activated apps like mail for example.

[keeperofdakeys]

I suspect the webview was updated because of two related reasons, first they didn't want to maintain a separate webkit, and second because Chromium/Chrome have switched to Blink (a fork of webkit). Also, being Chromium this should be directly in the ASOP sources, so it's still separate from Chrome.