Microsoft has begun to actively contribute to the development of Android

Under the leadership of Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft), the company has become an ally of the open source community.

And it is that along with open source projects such as Chromium and GitHub, the technology giant also wants to help Android better interact with next-generation hardware.

In fact, just like Chromium, which is also maintained by Google, anyone can take the Android source code and create their own version of Android. Nokia has created its own Android-based "X" platform and Amazon has also created its own version of Android using code from the "Android Open Source Project (AOSP)".

With your involvement in open source development, Recent data shows that Microsoft is one of the best things that can happen to Chrome.

With the new Edge browser, Microsoft has taken the "if you can't beat them, join them" approach and it appears to be working well in favor of the company given the latest market share reports.

According to the October 2020 browser market share report, although Google Chrome still has a good advantage over Microsoft Edge, the latest figures show that Microsoft's browser now has a desktop market share of 10.22%, a participation that was 8.84% in September.

Another recent news that was revealed, is that 161 engineers on the Microsoft Edge team have made more than 1.835 commits on the Chromium project open source since November last year. Microsoft has worked in a wide range of areas including battery, memory, performance, privacy, layout, media playback, HTML form controls, and more. Microsoft's contributions to the Chromium Project have already brought a number of benefits to its own Edge, Google Chrome, and other browsers.

Microsoft continues to actively contribute to a constant stream of new features for Chromium. In fact, a code compromise the company worked on until the end of November revealed that the tech giant plans to improve browser security with a new "administrator" or elevated permissions approach.

Historically, Microsoft has been involved in the development of Android. In recent years, the manufacturer of Windows has become an ally of Android and Microsoft has released several useful applications for the mobile platform. Microsoft is now actively contributing to the development of the Android operating system itself.

And is that Microsoft has made more than 80 code commits for the Android platform, according to Google's Android review page, and is actively making changes to Android to allow better integration with next-gen hardware. On November 24, Microsoft confirmed that it was working on a new API ("Dark Regions API") for Android.

“The Dark Regions API adds information about the regions of the screen that have been obscured by other tasks or by the system user interface. The API will allow the developer to flow the experience back to the visible regions. For example, a Launcher could animate its bottom drawer to unobstructed regions to allow the user to launch another application, ”Microsoft noted.

At the same time, Microsoft is adding other Android developers and engineers to the team intern working on Surface Duo, Surface Duo 2 and Android.

Since last year, Microsoft has prepared something unusual and decidedly different. Microsoft's definitive plan to take Android into new territory, on a dual-screen smartphone, could have huge implications not only for the future of the platform, but for mobile technology in general.

Linux is already integrated with Windows too as part of the "Windows Subsystem for Linux", and on Monday we learned that Microsoftt is also working on the Android subsystem for Windows 10.

The new subsystem would allow app developers to run their Android apps on Windows 10, with little or no code changes.

The project is codenamed "Latte," according to Windows Central, which specifies that production would be for next year.


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