I enjoyed that brief Android Chrome experiment where the browser supported moving the address bar to the bottom. Now that feature has been made available on iOS, but remains AWOL on Android.
That would require someone at Google caring about Android. Apart from the amazing team working to modulate the OS, nobody likes working with Android. Look at 14, it’s a code clean up with one feature stolen from iOS (lock screen customisation) which was much better and more interesting back before Lolipop. No master plan, no building up to something. No wonder they can promise 7 years of support for the Pixel 8, there’s nothing in the pipeline.
But it’s not just Android, Google have reached a point where they don’t know what to do about anything. ChatGPT snuck up on them. Rust has decimated any chance of Kotlin being widely adopted. Europe is getting more aggressive about controlling how they operate. Ad money isn’t bringing in what it once did. Any attempts at trying to corner the cookie market are hated. It why we’re seeing the ad block stuff on YouTube and another round of the Google Graveyard, they be running out of money and have no idea how to bring in new revenue.
I think you are over exaggerating here. This isn’t just a case for Chrome to first introduce the new features to iOS, but many other cross-platform apps choose to do so. And it doesn’t need to be because nobody cares about Android. Android still has a larger user base especially when it comes to Chrome. But when you develop for iOS you optimize for tens of devices (maybe not even that) and maybe the latest 3 iOS versions, but when you develop for Android you optimize for thousands of devices from different manufacturers, that put different skins on top of Android, where one runs Android 13, the other one Android 11, and the another one Android 9. Hence when releasing a new feature you first put the work to the iOS version, see the user feedback, change and tweak some things and then put the work to make a functional Android version. I am not a professional dev myself by any means, so I can’t really say everything in confidence, but developing for Android probably takes more debugging and time, because of the variability of the environment the app will run in.
