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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://9to5google.com/2019/09/11/google-scrapped-touchless-chrome-android-feature-phones/ [9to5google.com]

For the past six months, we’ve been tracking Google’s progress on introducing feature phones as a new form factor for both Android [9to5google.com] and the Chrome browser [9to5google.com]. Now it seems plans may have changed, as Google seems to be removing all of the code for Chrome’s Android-based touchless mode.

Early this year, we discovered that Google was working on a version of Chrome that was designed to be used by feature phones without a touchscreen, a form factor that still sees significant usage in emerging markets. This “touchless” Chrome even included a bonus standalone version of the Dino Runner mini-game [9to5google.com] reworked for the new screen size.

This morning, reader Kawshik tipped us off to a new work-in-progress commit with the straightforward title, “Remove touchless* with the exception of Blink code [googlesource.com].” In the code change, we see Google removing all references to touchless Chrome and deleting the hundreds of files within the “touchless” folder.

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