Community Supported Google Chrome Snap Wrapper

Desktop Snap Store
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Flatpak already has a well functioning community supported version of Google Chrome. Would there ever be a Snapcraft version?

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It is my understanding that Google would be very unhappy with a community build of Google Chrome published directly for download in the snap store. The problem is that snap doesn’t have a way to do ‘click through’ EULAs.

So, for example, you can’t have a process where the user presses “install” and sees (and agrees to) a proprietary license for the software before any of the bits are downloaded.

Snap could have the facility to show such a license after the bits are downloaded. But it’s my understanding that the Google legal and product teams would be “unhappy” about that.

You could possibly make a snap which is just a wrapper, which shows the license then downloads the deb and installs it. But that’s just horrible, and kinda defeats the point of having snaps in the first place.

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Among the horrible possibilities: One can keep Snap confinement by keeping the downloaded binaries “inside” the snap and running them while retaining confinement. And [ab]use the Snap update mechanism by tying the snap version to the Chrome version (and regenerating the snap for each update). What could go wrong?!

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So are you basically saying that flatpak can do something (in this case) that snap cannot?

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Well, then there’s downloading the official via https://www.google.com/chrome/browser-tools/

So, I guess it really isn’t necessary.

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Nope. I’m saying that Flathub is (likely, I’m not a lawyer) doing something that Google wouldn’t be happy about. Namely the flatpak of Chrome downloads without showing a license. It’s possible Google don’t know, or are ignoring the issue though.

Snap absolutely could do this. There are some snaps which do similar things. But they’re usually just distributing software which is allowed to be shared. Chrome (and other Google projects) aren’t like that. They expect the user to agree to terms before any bits land on the consumer device.

In fact some time ago there was (and maybe still is) a Google Chrome snap in the store. It did a similar thing to the flatpak, by repacking the deb (that’s essentially all the flatpak does). But that snap is now private and cannot be downloaded. Likely (my guess) specifically because it would annoy Google, and Canonical don’t want to do that.

All just my opinion though. Who knows? :smiley:

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Oh, okay. My bad. I understood incorrectly. I thought that flatpak’ed Chrome could show that licence agreement before the install. Thank you for clarification!

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