Not in Google maps on iOS though.

Data sample of 1, here, but I tapped a link in Google Maps on iOS 15 and it opened using regular embedded Safari, not Chrome or anything remotely Chrome-like. It uses SFSafariViewController and there’s a button at the top to go back to Chrome (Done), it animates in from the bottom, and you can tap an icon in the lower right corner to open in Safari or another browser. Safari is set as my default browser. I changed by default browser to Chrome and the same thing happened, Google Maps still used SFSafariViewController. I like it. :)

It's an embedded browser. When I click a web link in an app, I want my browser app to open it.

There's no option in Google maps to do this.

The button, bottom right, opens the page in Safari, and is standard across all iOS apps implementing that webview. In what way(s) is that not what you are looking for?

I just want it to open my default browser on the first click. There's a setting for that now.

Otherwise the history is lost, among other things.

It’s a usability trade off in some ways. Some people will find it confusing that a link opens their web browser. They might ask how to go back to Google Maps. This way there’s a balance. They can quickly preview the link, and if they want to keep it, they can open it intentionally in their browser or share/copy the link with one tap. Users who don’t understand how tabs work won’t find their browsing interrupted by every webpage an app throws their way.

But indeed, that doesn’t prevent an app maker such as Google Maps from making it a preference. Technically if Apple made it a preference it might break the expected UI for apps using the control. And as I noted before, there are advantages to previewing links this way, it encourages users to stay within the app.

There is no technical reason why it doesn’t log history events when loaded. It could send a message to the default browser or keep a log in the background and let the browser know when it next launches, and arguably for consistency Apple should design such a feature.

> They might ask how to go back to Google Maps. This way there’s a balance.

In iOS when an app opens another app, there is a back button specifically to go back to the original app. It's right there at the top left where the standard back button for most app navigation normally is.

> it encourages users to stay within the app.

This is one of the main reasons why they do it in my opinion. Another reason is because they can track your activity in the embedded webview.

It's probably a good sign that you had to tell this the Google engineer.

I did know you can turn it off. But I want setting a default browser that supports the Custom Tabs protocol (ex: Firefox) to make that browser be used any time an app asks for a custom tab, without any additional steps.

This is currently not possible because the filtering is done by the application calling CCT. The default CCT library implementation explicitly filters on the list of known Chrome app IDs and the app has to explicitly work around this filtering by trying the default browser first before falling back to the default CCT call.

It sounds like you're saying that this is currently not possible because it's currently not implemented that way? But of course! I'm saying they should change it so that the application asking for a custom tab can only request "please give me a custom tab".

I'm saying it's not possible at the OS level because the filtering is done in application code. CCT is not an OS service, it's a client library and a service IDL. Updating the library to remove the ability to filter by application ID is similarly not possible because binding to specific application IDs is not unique to CCT, it's simply how binding to services works on Android.

You lost me. Are you saying that the people who make Android OS can't reprogram Android OS? That is all this person is saying.

That's not what they're saying. The "chrome custom tabs" feature is a service interface exposed by an application, not the OS. There is no "open a custom tab" feature provided by Android. Therefore applications have to locate an installed browser that is known to support CCT before asking that application to start a Custom Tabs activity. The involvement of the OS in this interaction is to show the calling activity a list of applications that handle the ACTION_VIEW intent for URLs, and to bind the browser's CCT service to the interface for the client. The clients are the one choosing to only interact with Chrome at this point!