Innovative floating browser Link Bubble, has been unpublished from Google Play says the owner of the application, Brave Software.
The announcement came on March 11, with the decision made after a number of Android releases failed to address significant bugs that held back development. In a blog post, Brave Software said:
Link Bubble is simply not set up for success in the long run, given Google’s refusal to fix Android to support a webview that runs and renders from a background service (this is how Link Bubble runs in order to float bubbles over your current app).
Link Bubble first came to our attention when it was published by Chris Lacey who currently develops Action Launcher, one of our favourite launchers. Chris sold Link Bubble to Brave Software in August 2015 in order to concentrate his development efforts on Action Launcher.
Brave Software did throw in a thanks to Chris in their blog post saying ‘We want to thank Chris M. Lacy, the creator of Link Bubble, for this great product’.
Brave Software incorporated the technology behind Link Bubble into their ‘Brave Browser‘ for Android which remains available on Google Play. Brave Browser does have quite a few features including ‘tabs; speed; built-in and on-by-default ad-blocking and tracking protection; HTTPS Everywhere; and an optimized data and battery experience’.
Link Bubble will remain open source if anyone wishes to continue developing it. The code is available over on Git Hub if you’re interested.
It’s so long to Link Bubble, but if you’re still after a browser similar to Link Bubble, why not try out Flynx which is still available in Google Play.
I use Chromer, which seems to be kind of in between Link Bubble and opening Chrome. It uses a Chrome view, so you get all your logins/passwords, autofill, etc.
Moved off link bubble to flynx ages ago as it was really buggy.. Have tried it again a few times but bugs were still there.. So not surprise..
Still have link bubble installed after seeing your initial article on it. Maybe my memory is distorted but I seem to remember it being more stable in the early days before Chris sold it.
Great app that suffered from a lack of development in recent years. Flynx does the job for me now.
Yeah, I don’t think its performance had improved much since Brave took over. It’s a shame that dev issues like this stopped it from getting any better.
This is actually the first I’ve heard of LinkBubble.