There might be 1'300 brands and 24'000 devices, but all are bound to the Google conditions. This is not choice.
Phone makers may be free to also pre-install competing apps alongside Googles, but they are not free to not install Googles app. This is not choice.
I'm using a Jolla phone. Its producer (afaik) is not allowed to support the Play Store without accepting the far reaching (now deemed illegal) conditions of Google. A severe hindrance of my choice.
What is this sentence about the rule "sends a troubling signal in favor of proprietary systems over open platforms"? The Google Play Services is closed source and required for quite some Android apps, is it?
Of course you intend to appeal. But from my point of view you deserve every cent of the fine!
> There might be 1'300 brands and 24'000 devices, but all are bound to the Google conditions. This is not choice.
Building and maintaining android costs money. It's your opinion that "following Google's conditions" is onerous, and "not choice." Clearly the situation is that the android business model is supported by Google's terms. The alternative is something maintained by whom?
> The Google Play Services is closed source and required for quite some Android apps, is it?
As someone who worked in abuse: if you provide an app store that doesn't have governance, it'll be full of spyware/malware and finding the app you actually want, well good luck. So yeah, the app store service is run by Google and it wouldn't make any sense for that to be open source.
The overall angry attitude that "this all should be free software and that there are unpure components is wrong" -- is kind of shameful. If you care so much then go build a free software alternative. And if you're mad about walled gardens then get mad at Apple. Google's trying for a middle ground to provide consumers more choice than iOS vs free-software-that-nobody-maintains-or-isn't-safe. Yelling at people to make everything free isn't a solution.
> Building and maintaining android costs money. ... Clearly the situation is that the android business model is supported by Google's terms. The alternative is something maintained by whom?
It's not the EU's responsibility to come up with a new business model for Android that isn't illegal. Just because the business model they chose is illegal doesn't mean that we have throw out the baby with the bathwater.
> As someone who worked in abuse: if you provide an app store that doesn't have governance, it'll be full of spyware/malware and finding the app you actually want, well good luck. So yeah, the app store service is run by Google and it wouldn't make any sense for that to be open source.
I think you're conflating two separate issues. Google Play services include much more than just the Play Store and could very well be open source or at least have publicly accessible APIs licensed on non-anticompetitive terms. The Play Store can keep out malware without requiring phone makers to swear undivided loyalty and submission to Google.
> It's not the EU's responsibility to come up with a new business model for Android that isn't illegal.
Actually it is. A regulatory body is supposed to give maximum freedom to business to help them come up with cheaper and better products while not violating other people's rights.
EU is equivalent of the white cop shooting an unarmed black kid and then have audacity to call himself the defender of law and justice.
But Google is simply pointing out that the people who will end up paying the $5B fine is not Google shareholders by the EU users. As a person who owns Google shares I think Google must modify their playstore policies to charge EU android users and extra fee to pay for this $5B fine.
>A regulatory body is supposed to give maximum freedom to business to help them come up with cheaper and better products while not violating other people's rights.
Where did you manage to come up with that definition of regulatory bodies? Their job is to regulate actors under their jurisdiction based on goals set for them by their respective legislature. They don't all have an overarching goal of improving businesses. Some are(were) explicitly opposed to business interests like the EPA
> It's your opinion that "following Google's conditions" is onerous, and "not choice." Clearly the situation is that the android business model is supported by Google's terms.
Android has a huge market dominance and Google looses some scope in their terms. I do think for competitors "following Google's conditions" is "not choice", e.g. you have to have the Play Store or you loose bitterly. Most/many good apps are only available through the Play Store.
A choice for me would be when a competitor has access to Play Store (of course with a fair compensation) without enabling Google at the same time to install many other unwanted/data grabbing apps/services.
> Yelling at people to make everything free isn't a solution.
Regarding closed source you misunderstood or I didn't write well. I was not angrily critizising (or yelling even) that Google Play Services is closed source, I wanted to express that one major part of Android is _already_ closed source when Pichai said "sends a troubling signal in favor of proprietary systems over open platforms". -- (Besides, what good is open platforms when services come with heavy strings attached and, sometimes, are taken away in a blink because some algorithm decided...).
> So yeah, the app store service is run by Google and it wouldn't make any sense for that to be open source.
I don't see why you're equating "governance" with "open source". You can have either one without the other.
And governance driven by a open community is also possible.
Also, the spyware you describe is only possible because of the security model employed. It's also possible to completely secure a platform so as to make these sorts of problems a thing of the past.
“If phone makers and mobile network operators couldn’t include our apps on their wide range of devices, it would upset the balance of the Android ecosystem,”
Its as though Pichai thinks people actually want all of Google's shovelware on their devices. Why does Google try and sneakily update and re-enable their low quality Newsstand, Games and other apps that I literally do not want on my phone? Unbundling is the right move, even the Play Store should not be in the ROM itself, as when it gets updated you have no way to free the space that is used by the older version of the Play APK.
That is what infuriates me about bundled shovelware like <vendor specific apps>, Facebook, <carrier apps>, when those get updated or disabled, you still don't get to delete the original APK file. Your never getting that room on your storage back!
In the same way, you won't get back the space taken by recovery partition on a random laptop.
It's there for a reason - to get the device back to the same state as it left the factory. If you could remove random apks from there, that objective would be impossible.
So on Android devices, the /system partition is read-only intentionally. The space taken by it at least has a use during both runtime and recovery; traditionally the recovery is completely wasted space.
What I do mind thought, is the Android vendor's ability to prevent user disabling their apps, and abusing it. There's no reason why I should keep Samsung's (for example) showelware enabled.
I don't know how big the unremovable version of google play services is in most roms, but the currently installed version on my phone is 400MB. I'm guessing that means it takes 20% of the storage on a low end 4GB phone. When the recovery images on computers were significant compared to the overall storage, they were more commonly included on separate discs, or a utility was present for the owner to archive the recovery image onto discs locally and then remove it and expand the visible partition.
Since the apps are all going to be updated shortly after unboxing anyway, it would be better for the user to just include a stub downloader for most things. Enough of google play services to update the services to current and offer (but not force) install the rest of the "essential" apps. Plus a small basic browser; Chrome is 177 MB on my phone.
Most low end phones are shipping with at least 8GB of storage, but up to 7GB of that is eaten by the system partition usually, giving you effectively no space.
Maybe low end phones in the US are shipping with 8GB; low end phones in lower income markets still only have 4GB. (See the recent articles about life with a Bharat 2)
Shovelware shouldn't be in the system partition, plain and simple. Its a bad industry practice, even on Laptops (which do let you delete the recovery partition FYI).
On (unlocked) mobiles, you can re-partition the device and write /system image without the apps you don't want too. Few users will bother, just like few users will bother with deleting the recovery partitions on laptops.
By request, I've done this for friends and family a few times. Few users bother because it's made arbitrarily difficult so as to seem dangerous to many non IT professionals.
Sony has been getting more and more aggressive shoveling garbage down my throat via the playstation 4 funnel. I can't imagine ever giving them another dime as a result. Hopefully they'll keep going until they cross most people's line so the door can swing the other way.
With the ARM platform, resizing the partitions comes with significant risk if something goes wrong. In the PC-land, the equivalent would be the potential of losing your BIOS/UEFI. Many people would then think twice about repartitioning.
PC repartitioning only looks dangerous, because ordinary users are not aware where they put their data, and changing partitions and resizing filesystems is a nice way to loose at least some of them.
I don't own PS4, so I cannot comment on that. I do own Xperia phone thought, and I'm satisfied with it.
Stateside, most phones ship with locked bootloaders. Most models never see their bootloader get unlocked, because all the development interest goes towards the flagship phones from Samsung and LG.
The locked status and unlockability, is being done on request of carriers. Because they order thousands of pieces, they get to say what those pieces should do.
If you do not agree, get your stuff elsewhere, the carriers will get the memo eventually. Yes, I know that you would have to pay the full price, and with carriers you don't have to, but then the locked status and customized firmware comes as a part of the price for the convenience.
Is losing 10, even 100mb something to get "infuriated" about when phones have 32-128gb now, and 100mb is like 1 video you took? It's not like this is Windows system tray software where your precious ram is being eaten up. It's disk space dude.
(Also being able to factory reset the phone is worth losing 100mb imo.)
For me it's not about the space, but this kind of thing infuriates me too.
I'm struggling to articulate a concise way to describe why practices like this upsets me so much. When I fall victim to things like this, I feel like companies are forcing my head into a pile of shit.
With android, The only time it ever happened to me was when I got an HTC evo. I spent half a months rent on that thing and Sprint decided to bundle it with a ton of applications I absolutely did not want. Finding out I couldn't uninstall their ringtone store, whatever app blockbuster paid to have shit into my phone and all the other nonsense admittedly raised my blood pressure.
I did a lot of googling and was made even angrier to learn that the only way around it was to re-flash the firmware. At the time, the outcomes I was reading about seemed pretty mixed so this seemed awfully risky to do to my new phone.
Since then, I only buy unlocked phones so I can get at that /system folder if I need to.
Unfortunately, anything that has a socket back to the mothership eventually seems to decay into shit. My ps4 has been moving the streaming apps I use further and further down the UI so I have to go back to scroll past whatever company de jure they've sold me out to this week.
Their file system has tons of options to customize sorting / positioning / visibility of everything except their streaming section, because "fuck you, you're still revenue" despite having spent 400$ on the box. I hate how often I get reminded that Stallman was right.
What if every time you went to your closet to find a shirt, the company that built your house had hung a new multi million dollar company's representative on one of your hangers that screams "HEY GIVE ME MONEY, I'LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING THAT WILL FINALLY MAKE YOU HAPPY" as bright lights flash in your face and sirens spin. Every time one of your neighbors gives them a dollar you can hear the celebratory gong from your breakfast table. It's corporate panhandling, and once you make the mistake of buying a device their dicks are still inside you're now forced to suck it down.
I have intentionally entered into plenty of relationships with companies to have cheap(er) product subsidized by advertising. It's a choice and I know what I'm getting.
But I feel like we're getting to the point where no amount of money is enough to opt out of ads in certain types of products:
* Physical copies of movies
* Non-libre operating systems [1]
* Gaming consoles
* Phones
* Most websites
* Most print media (excepting books)
* All television
In many of these cases, I've chosen to not participate at all, rather than enter into such an agreement. But that's kind of sad.
[1] I'm really just generalizing about consumer Windows here. Sweet monkey lord, when I open the "Start" menu on a nearby Windows 10 laptop, it's visually like walking into a Las Vegas casino! I assume the enterprise Windows situation is not like that? Also, I don't know if it's better or worse on Macs?
At the moment, it is better on Mac, but who the hell knows how long until the touch bar is repurposed as a billboard to sell you a subscription to WWE's streaming service or whatever the fuck.
Sweet monkey lord indeed. I used to be one of those rare Windows evangelists who said C# was the best thing since sliced bread, Windows 7 was the best thing since Windows 2000, WPF was my favorite way to make apps, and the microsoft surface (the table sized one) was going to change computing forever. I even nearly bought a zune.
Now I turn my PC on in disgust just so my daughter can play Job Simulator. After my macbook dies, maybe I'll wind down the consulting business, move to South Dakota and start selling plasma.
In a sense, yes. I currently have a Moto G 1st generation that I acquired approximately 4 years back. I intended to keep it for at least a year or 2 more, but through the steady accumulation of such 100 mb losses, I have ~ 500 mb storage left on an 8 gb phone.
Now, with a reasonable OS that should be enough. However, Android insists that it does not have enough storage for app updates, and keeps bugging me with a notification for this. I fail to understand how this is possible given that the app size itself is less than a 100 mb in many cases. Almost every week I am forced to clear the cache in order to perform updates. I believe this has something to do with the swap file - but am not sure.
As a consumer, I feel artificially pushed onto a useless upgrade train. The only reason I am merely annoyed and not infuriated is because I have finally found a legitimate reason (for my needs) to upgrade - a better camera.
I have a Moto G 1st generation and put LineageOS [0] on it. Far better experience and much more free space.
Unfortunately won't help with making the camera better.
I want my storage, and advertising for memory on device these days is fraudulent. How many of the supposed 32GB of flash is actually available once you boot your phone up? Generally 7GB to 11GB is eaten by Android and shovelware right off the bat, I'd call it fraud if something is sold to me with the expectation of 34% more storage space than what I actually end up with.
It's not fraudulent; your expectations are out of line. If you flash some other OS onto your device, you'll have (32gb - whatever the size of your OS is). So to market the device as having 32gb, then having the OS take up some space, is completely accurate. The _specs_ do not indicate how much actual free space you have. This is the nature of electronic devices that have memory but require software to work.
Flashing a different OS onto most Android devices isn't possible, especially if its not a newer flagship phone. There is no foreseeable way to recover even part of this space on most Androids, which is especially troublesome considering they ship with under 32GB of storage usually.
Regardless the point was that the spec is factually correct so there's no bait and switch here. If you're lamenting the need to understand that OS'es take up space on the phone you purchased, I don't know what to tell you. Nobody gives the "with OS" memory figure.
If you go to the low budget market in other countries, finding phones with 2 and 4GB of internal memory is not rare, even common. The cameras are so potato that 100mb of video is a long recording time too.
Lots of people can't afford or don't want to afford the high end phones that Samsung or HTC have.
"And what about Google choosing anti-competitive (i.e. Illegal) business model?" I think the law should be re-written so its not illegal, or what Google's competitors are doing should also be considered illegal.
I made both of those points abundantly clear. Yes, I did answer their question.
They have the choice to build their own OS. The reason they don’t is clear, it’s too expensive. Google instead of charging money requires certain licensing conditions. If they truly want full control they could build it themselves but obviously they’re prefer google’s licensing model.
That's the current local optimum for phone manufacturers. The anti trust regulations exist, in part, to help prevent companies from forcing a local optimum that ensures no one ever tried something different, and thus forces the industries to keep improving.
If the OS was so good on it's own then google would not need these licensing terms to maintain market share.
I don't see this as a bad thing. There was nothing wrong with for-pay operating systems, like Symbian. A manufacturer could just buy a license, and pass the cost along to the consumer, without the consumer being coerced into signing up for services and handing over their private data. A Symbian license used to be $5 per unit. Google's Android model likely makes Google multiples of that over the lifetime of each unit, but somehow Google has managed to bill Android as "free."
A simple exchange of currency for a product is a fantastic business model. Google has been instrumental in undermining it, with "free" products, and I wouldn't be sad to see that stop.
Agreed. Given the direction Google has gone with Android (and it sure looks like they're working hard to try to kill it off in favor of something they control completely like Chrome OS/Fuchsia/whatever) it would be great to inject some actual competition into the mobile marketplace. The current Apple/Google duopoly isn't getting it done for me.
> somehow Google has managed to bill Android as "free."
Unfortunately, Google got away with telling a whopper of a lie in that they were building a free and open platform when behind the scenes they were doing anything but. Maybe it was true in the first year or two but hasn't been the case this decade (i.e. the ODM agreements prohibiting non-Google flavors of Android which are pretty much the reason it's so difficult to find non-Google flavored devices based on the 'open' Android platform. IIRC, Amazon only managed to get it done by going to the few contract manufacturers who weren't already making any Google authorized devices for anyone else.)
That's basically what the EU is demanding. The EU has handed down what is an anti-tying decision. "You can't tie Android to Google Search, because that prevents competition in Search."
Okay then, but Google Search is what paid for Android development, so if you can't tie them together, Android needs to seek other sources of funding. The most obvious one is some sort of licensing fee.
(It could also possibly fund itself from search revenue (like Firefox) and App Store fees, although the second one could be broken up by the EU too on anti-tying grounds)
It's no different from when Windows was prevented from tying Windows to Internet Explorer. It opened competition in browsers (and we now have Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Brave, etc.), but it also forced browsers to find independent business models.
Okay then, but Google Search is what paid for Android development, so if you can't tie them together, Android needs to seek other sources of funding. The most obvious one is some sort of licensing fee.
A licensing fee would be a valid and reasonable outcome. It probably can even work without making Android closed-source, by choosing the licenses accordingly or maybe have some kind of early-access or migration-support agreements (IANAL).
The main point is that Google is using a monopoly in one market to retain a monopoly in another market, and this is illegal. As far as I'm reading the press release, Google is not barred from developing and offering Android for free, if they wish so - they are only disallowed to abuse their monopoly.
but it also forced browsers to find independent business models
It stopped Microsoft from preventing independent business models for browsers; it was just too late already for the commercial browser vendors of the time. And the current EU ruling will hopefully allow other mobile OS developers (or startups) to compete on more equal grounds.
Of course we still have the network effect of Google Play, featuring a market dominance over Android apps and Android users. I wouldn't be too surprised to see another future EU ruling requiring Google to unbundle Google Play from all but technical requirements, possibly allowing users to legally get access to Google Play on AOSP-based devices, or using alternative clients.
> The main point is that Google is using a monopoly in one market to retain a monopoly in another market, and this is illegal. As far as I'm reading the press release, Google is not barred from developing and offering Android for free, if they wish so - they are only disallowed to abuse their monopoly.
I agree with this and it's a good thing, but where does it ends? When can we say this is another market, don't touch it?
Qualcomm is pretty much the standard on cellphone processor. Their processor include a GPU, called Adreno. I want to manufacture GPU for phone. By including it on their processor and not offering it without one, they essentially force their buyer to ignore my offering. Are they trying to illegally retain monopoly over GPU for phones? CPU and GPU are 2 different market (desktop PC prove this pretty clearly).
> Android closed-source, by choosing the licenses accordingly or maybe have some kind of early-access or migration-support agreements (IANAL).
Absolutely. Something akin to https://licensezero.com might fit the bill. There’s plenty of innovation left to do in the space of source code licensing.
> It opened competition in browsers (and we now have Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Brave, etc.)
MS all but ceasing development on IE after version 6 is what opened competition in browsers, not any government action. Remember from IE4 to 6 before Firefox was released Internet Explorer really was the best browser out there. MS used their Windows monopoly to aid distribution and their huge piles of cash to make it free (vs paid-for Netscape), but it wasn't like it was crap software that was only being used because MS force-fed it to everybody. At least not until they (probably intentionally) let it wither and die and Firefox and then Chrome ate their lunch.
Was about to disagree but on closer reading I agree.
I'll still say the browser choice thing was a good thing as it spread the message, and helped get a critical mass of users to use other browser so that web developers had to design cross browser solutions for a while until they got lazy again and started only designing for Chrome.
Is there any evidence the EU's mandated browser choice thing had that effect at all? IIRC what moved the needle on Firefox was huge grassroots campaigns, and what moved the needle on Chrome was advertising it on the Google home page. I've never heard any argument that the Windows choice box made any impact.
It was intentional, the even disbanded the development team. Even in the mid 90s it was obvious to everyone that web apps would be the future. If web apps were the future then win32 didn't matter and their grip on computing would be lost. IMO the mistake they made was not doubling down and turning IE into the next windows. Instead they tried to bring win32 to the web.
IE was terrible for anyone not using Windows. They encouraged ActiveX and didn't keep to web specs.
Imagine if they'd kept their monopoly and we'd all had to stay on Vista and Windows Mobile because it was the only way to browse the web. Flash would still be a thing. The iPhone could have failed because it couldn't load most websites. We might still have keypads on our phones.
I used other browsers on Windows before Internet Explorer ever existed, and even on Windows versions that came with IE in the box, either it was the age where we still used Netscape Navigator CDs to install it (and all your mime type handlers would change from IE to Navigator), or later or, I used IE to just download installers for other browsers.
It didn't open competition at all, it just made Microsoft pay for what every OS does today: it includes a browser by default. OSX, iOS, Android, multiple game consoles, and even some TVs.
They got punished for innovation, and no one else had to pay the fine for copying their behavior.
Microsoft wasn't punished for bundling the browser with the OS.
They were punished because they did that while IE and MS both had major market positions.
The game consoles are split between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, you have choice there. OSX and iOS are only shipped on Mac devices which don't have major marketshares either.
When you have a majority marketshare then you can't do what you want, there is rules. Especially when it comes to abusing your major position to leverage other positions (Sony and Nintendo are hardly pushing their browser products)
Apple abuses its market position as being the only vendor authorized to ship devices with iOS and OSX. I cannot buy, say, an LG or Samsung iPhone. They abuse their market position by not allowing third party core functionality on their phone at all, nor third party devices at all.
Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony abuse their market positions via exclusive AAA titles that will never come to other platforms, without a valid technological limitation being available (Nintendo owns emulators for tons of past systems, that can work on x86 and ARM fine; Switch internally is 100% the same SoC as the Shield TV; XBOne and PS4 are both AMD APUs and involve no Microsoft or Sony magic in the core hardware).
Phones nor game consoles are not equivalent: when I buy them, I am not buying a device, I am buying a member of an ecosystem. Apple 100% dominates the Apple ecosystem, Microsoft 100% the Xbox ecosystem, Sony 100% the Sony ecosystem, Nintendo 100% of the Nintendo ecosystem.
They have committed far more sins against their own customers than Google has for not dominating the Android ecosystem (as they do not make any Android devices (Pixel does not count, it is an LG and HTC product line)), and the EU has fined Google for an unrelated domination in the search market (of which, Google has no realistic competitors, and not because Google somehow prevented the development of other search engines magically).
In comparison to Microsoft /w MSIE, the MSIE team did not abuse their customers by including a browser by default. They allowed people in the Windows ecosystem to connect to the Internet (a much larger ecosystem) with no additional software for free.
MSIE-era Microsoft and Google were fined for allowing choice, and by allowing choice their platforms (and thus ecosystems) became popular.
DoJ vs Microsoft and EU vs Google both have illustrated that the governments prefer Equality of Outcome over Equality of Opportunity. This tells big business, don't bother innovating, don't bother taking advantage of first mover strategies, don't bother doing anything that might benefit your customers; just lock them into little walled gardens, because you'll make a lot of money but not risk becoming popular enough to get fined.
Apple certainly learned from this, iPhones aren't popular, iMacs and MBPs aren't popular, but Apple will probably be the first company ever with a $1T market cap.
Apple does not have a major position in smartphones or search engines.
Their only monopoly is to sell their own devices, which is totally okay. You can compete by making a YouPhone that's better than the iPhone.
>Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony abuse their market positions
Again, neither has a major market position over the other and it does not prevent any of the other from competing. As you mention, each is capable of putting out exclusives just fine.
>when I buy them, I am not buying a device, I am buying a member of an ecosystem
You seem under the false impression that this is about you. This is purely about competition. As long as any of those vendors do not prevent the others from fairly competing on the market, the EU won't lift a finger.
>They have committed far more sins against their own customers than Google has for not dominating the Android ecosystem
Google is dominating the mobile browser and internet search markets, which, if you check the EU ruling, is the markets this is about.
The android market itself is irrelevant.
>They allowed people in the Windows ecosystem to connect to the Internet (a much larger ecosystem) with no additional software for free.
And google allows vendors to ship phones that can connect to the internet with no additional software for free.
>MSIE-era Microsoft and Google were fined for allowing choice, and by allowing choice their platforms (and thus ecosystems) became popular.
Completely false, they were fined for disadvantaging competitors who would not be able to compete on a fair market.
>DoJ vs Microsoft and EU vs Google both have illustrated that the governments prefer Equality of Outcome over Equality of Opportunity.
Atleast in the EU case, false again. The EU favors a market in which everyone has a level playing field, primarly enforced by having additional rules for any major players in a market. This doesn't tell business to not innovate or first mover advantage, both are allowed.
It's not disallowed to have a major market position but it's disallowed to abuse it to either disadvantage other competitors in the same or other markets.
Otherwise MS would have been fined for producing windows and selling it in the EU, which has not been the case to my knowledge.
Having OEMs pay a licensing fee to Google seems better than having Google stiffle competition by bundling Google Play and Search and requiring OEMs to not ship alternative non-Google AOSP products.
Okay then, but Google Search is what paid for Android development, so if you can't tie them together, Android needs to seek other sources of funding. The most obvious one is some sort of licensing fee.
And that’s a good thing. I prefer simple transactions. I give a company money and they give me stuff. It’s very transparent business model.
Yeah, that's why I'm favor of this decision. I think it's reasonable for regulators to have an anti-tying bias and make companies prove that the tying is somehow necessary. Because the alternative to tying (as you say) is a more open, competitive, and transparent "cash for stuff" market.
But then Android wouldn't be open source anymore. That would be a big shame and it's bizarre to see HN commenters arguing after so many years of shitting on things like Play Services that, in effect, they want Android to become entirely proprietary.
It'd also send a powerful signal to lots of other companies - don't create open platforms monetized through additional services. As so much open source code is funded by companies, that'd be a huge blow.
What most people think of “Android” has never been open source. Android has always been the unusable AOSP part + Google Play Services + proprietary binary drivers. Google has over the years abandoned much of the open source parts and created proprietary versions.
No one is saying that they want Android to become proprietary. There are plenty of open source projects supported by major corporations - Angular, React, NodeJS, WebKit, CUPS, Java, .Net Core, Swift, etc.
If a company only wants to license part of Google Play Services they should be able to pay for just that. If Android is so valuable, other companies should be willing to contribute to AOSP. How healthy is a piece of open source software if it completely dies once one corporate benefactor abandons it?
That's simply not true is it - there are plenty of people who have made their own Android ROMS using the released code, and Android still comes with the same set of apps it always did. Yes, Google has often made better apps that compete with the built in open source ones, but you can still get a very capable and powerful mobile OS for free just by downloading it. And as for proprietary drivers, well that's the hw vendors not Google doing that.
> The Commission decision concludes that Google is dominant in the markets for general internet search services, licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system.
And the complaint isn't about choice of OSes or any "anti-FOSS" bullshit, but about choice of search on Android and abusing their position to stop use of Android forks:
In particular, Google:
• has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store);
• made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-installed the Google Search app on their devices; and
• has prevented manufacturers wishing to pre-install Google apps from selling even a single smart mobile device running on alternative versions of Android that were not approved by Google (so-called "Android forks").
Sure, and Pichai is saying it doesn't make good business sense for Google to spend a lot of money developing a mobile OS and then give it away for free unless they can use it to push their other products, like search. Google's business model was to give away the OS for free, but require Google apps to be bundled (in exchange for play store access).
So I have nothing against the EU decision, but Google's response is just common sense. They aren't a charity. If Google can't bundle their money makers with the phones, that kills the current business model and leaves them footing the Android development bill while getting nothing in return. So, they need a new business model; making Android proprietary is an obvious option.
That's the thing. The EU is not trying to tell Google how to make money from android. It's only saying it can't force installation of search and chrome. It's upto Google to find another means of making money that won't exploit their dominance in other markets
Sure, I have no problem at all with the commission’s findings or forcing Google to change its business practices.
But I find it weird when then people are shocked that google says it may make android proprietary. What exactly did people expect to happen? That Google would decide to develop Android as an act of charity to handset manufacturers and mobile carriers?
I would assume most android users think android is cheap rather than free. It would be interesting though to see their response to such price hike(if it ever happens)
That may be the argument. Yet it was considered by the commission & dismissed as there are ways to monetize android profitably for google without resorting to anticompetitive contracts.
Supposing a manufacturer wanted to use Android on it's phones, they could pay a sum of money for the right to do that in proportion to the number of phones the software were installed on. This fee would cover Google's costs and need for profit. You could call it a license fee, perhaps.
Sure, I don’t have any objection to the commission determining Google’s current businesss model is anticompetitive or forcing Google change it. However, when google then does change their business model, no one should react with surprise.
Yeah, I'd say this is wrong. His direct quote is [1]:
> Today, because of Android, a typical phone comes preloaded with as many as 40 apps from multiple developers, not just the company you bought the phone from. If you prefer other apps—or browsers, or search engines—to the preloaded ones, you can easily disable or delete them, and choose other apps instead, including apps made by some of the 1.6 million Europeans who make a living as app developers.
"Easily disable or delete"? Not to mention the lack of deletion on a lot of these (...any? I don't recall if I've seen any with deletion), I don't always even find a hard way to disable or delete preinstalled apps on phones... unless we're talking about booting custom bootloaders and wiping your phone etc.
Many preinstalled apps that aren't essential are just a stub, a few kb that points to the app store to be downloaded on first boot.
When these are "disabled" all that remains on the device is a pointer to the app store in a disabled state. It's a few KB of data, and in my opinion a fantastic trade-off to actually allowing deletion then not being able to "factory reset" since that data is no longer on the device.
This is definitely not the case on any Android I've recently worked with, disabling Facebook, Google Play Games, Google Newsstand, etc all just delete the user data and supposedly disable the app.
I hate that this shovelware is on my phone in any form, and it makes me regret buying a non-ROMmable phone in the first place.
It's during that "delete the user data" that it removes any updates to the app leaving behind only the part installed
on the system partition (which is read only).
But I should have been more clear. not all preinstalled apps are like this, just a lot of the less important ones (at least on google-branded phones, I have no idea what samsung or lg are doing to facebook). I believe it does require the developer of the app to actually implement it though.
But either way there is literally no benefit to removing those apps from the system partition. You won't get the space back (different partition), and if they allow users to delete these things they can very easily get their phone into a state that you can't recover from (factory reset won't work because there's nothing to reset to).
I'm 100% with you that non-essential apps should be uninstallable as much as possible, and preferably I'd like them to not be installed at all, but that's an entirely different issue than what Google was just fined for.
At the end of the day, i MUCH prefer Android's handling of removing/disabling factory installed apps over something like MacOS where if you "factory reset" the device, you can't use it again until you connect to a network and re-download the entire image.
Shovelware shouldn't be in the system partition in the first place. A factory reset should get you plain Android, not Android plus whatever your carrier got paid to dump on your phone.
Few Android users will ever experience a Google branded phone, mainly due to price and availability. I personally will never buy one after my friend's Pixel 2 XL started smoking, though that is her third failed Google phone. I joked that she should put it on the stack next to her Nexus 5X (defective solder joints) and OG Pixel (died of another hardware defect), but she shipped it back and is on week 3 of waiting to get the sucker back.
Comparatively, I've only ever seen one LG phone smoke that way, and an RMA request later I had an overnight shipping label and a new phone 2 days later. Wireless charging still worked in the meantime :P
> A factory reset should get you plain Android, not Android plus whatever your carrier got paid to dump on your phone.
I don't mind a button that does that, but when the name is "factory reset", it's literally supposed to reset the phone to what it was like coming out of the factory, which includes whatever they bundled with it.
"Shovelware shouldn't be in the system partition in the first place."
I completely agree, but that's not what this fine is about, and even the definition of what is "shovelware" is different for each person (I'd be annoyed if a browser wasn't installed by default).
Ironically what this fine is about will make it HARDER for Google to prevent shovelware (that's not theirs) from being included on the phone, because they can't threaten to take away access to the play store any more. So now Samsung is free to load up the bullshit onto the system partition and Google can't do much to stop them (or at least the bargaining chip that they were using is no longer an option).
For the record, I'm not against this EU decision, but I do have my issues with it.
It does give Samsung the ability to not include Google Play Movies and so forth in the system partition, which I'd be happy to see absent. Perhaps without Chrome shipping with every Android phone, there will be more users of alternative browsers on Android. This would be a welcome departure from the current state of affairs.
Yes, this decision does make it harder for google to strong arm Samsung into including Play Movies. But Samsung has shown many times that they have no issues including bloatware on their devices for some kind of pay.
It stands to reason that all Google would have to do is pay them, and the same result will still happen (unless this decision means that Google literally can't do that since they are in a dominant position, i'm not a lawyer so I don't know).
Overall I think we want the same stuff. More competition, less preinstalled shit, and a healthier ecosystem. However we disagree on how to get there. I personally think Android is heading the right direction. It's always been pretty simple to replace everything but the settings view with your own alternatives after install (hell, even the system web view can be swapped out, and IIRC Mozilla has been working on getting Firefox in a position so it can be the default web view on android if you want), and I agree that Google could be forced to do more in this space (a "select your browser from these 5 choices" is a good compromise, but I'd be pissed if I had to do that for my phone, messages, browser, email client, homescreen, etc... on every device i'd be annoyed. Not to mention that many people expect a Google phone to work well, and will go to Google when it doesn't. If my phone app stops working and I didn't choose the Google phone app, they now need to field calls from users who don't know Google can't do anything to fix it).
>A factory reset should get you plain Android, not Android plus whatever your carrier got paid to dump on your phone.
Disagree. It's nice for the technically-inclined but terrible for everyone else.
It's scummy that carriers get paid to shovel this crap on, but I'd think many consumers expect some of these apps and suffer without them. They just want their phones "to work."
The non-technically inclined can easily download Facebook and the like, its nothing they're unfamiliar with. The big difference is whether or not a horribly out of date version of that app is permanently embedded in the phone's storage.
Oddly enough, all of this locking down by google has me checking if a phone can be rooted and bootloader unlocked before I buy...then I have to make sure the newer phones arent shipped updated as then I can no longer root. If I can't root then I can't remove bloatware crap. If I can't have adblock and lineageOS I'm simply not interested. No note 8 for me, probably not 9 either, which is a shame, as I would love to give them my money. Oh and the best part of ROMs? You can make them as Google free as you want, I quite literally only use their play store. So Google claiming necessary integration is BS pure and simple.
I bought a Samsung Galaxy S9 a few days back. The preinstalled Facebook app (which I immediately disabled) has a listed version of 'stub (23.1.1)', and it's only 127 kB large.
For the ones that allow you to, yeah. But how would you e.g. easily disable/delete Google Play Services (say, if you didn't want Google on your phone)? The disable option is disabled.
Also, even when I try disabling some of these built-in Google apps that I supposedly can disable, I get a prompt warning me that "If you disable a built-in app, other apps may misbehave"... you can't keep a straight face telling a user "oh but you can easily disable this!" when you yourself are telling them the consequence is that it might break other things on their phone. (!)
They just mean apps that use Google play services will be broken. I don't think that's unreasonable. it seems you want it both ways, you want the ability to remove or disable Google play services, without losing access to them.
Thankfully those are most often bundled as stubs that take barely any space. roll back the updates and then disable. Did that to Chrome for the longest time as i was using Firefox on my Android device (before Mozilla went nuts. Now i am flipflopping between Opera and Brave, while waiting for Vivaldi to get a mobile version).
Keep in mind that (a) if the fact that you have to roll back updates is not obvious to people here, I'm not sure how a normal user is supposed to find it "easy", and (b) if you have to roll it back too, you'd lose your data in that app, so it's neither as consequence-free as disabling, nor as thorough as deleting (freeing all the space etc.).
Simply hitting "disable" warns you that it will uninstall updates & delete user data.
It's literally a single button press to get back 100% of the space possible, and it's the button called "disable" right in front at the top of the app's info section.
It's infuriatingly confusing and it's not clear that you will get back 100% of the space. If they are sincere about this, why cannot you simply fucking uninstall the damn application ? No stub, no nothing. Just a normal app like the others, that you can install or not.
Not just that you can't truly uninstall them without rooting the phone, but on my last android phone you couldn't even move Google's apps to the SD card to at least save some space.
If you allow a user to delete an app entirely like Chrome, then what do you do if they decide to factory reset their phone? The whole point of disabling instead of deleting is that it for all intents and purposes isn't there, but if a user factory resets they aren't screwed without a web browser or map application.
I know a lot of people that have no idea what a browser is.
they want access to the "internet" and they would actually search the app store for "internet" and not "firefox" or "browser".
so at least a browser should be pre-installed.
> If you allow a user to delete an app entirely like Chrome, then what do you do if they decide to factory reset their phone? The whole point of disabling instead of deleting is that it for all intents and purposes isn't there, but if a user factory resets they aren't screwed without a web browser or map application.
You could remove the app from the system while keeping it in the restoration image. Same way as how you can uninstall PC crapware when you buy a new one but it's still in the image in the recovery partition should you choose to factory reset.
That's literally what disabling it does, that's why there is a step titled "uninstalling updates" as the updated versions are installed on the user partition, but the preinstalled version is on a (mostly read only) system partition.
Removing that app from the system partition won't give you more usable space without repartitioning, and it will now mean that you can't factory reset the phone.
The solution is what ROMs do since cyanogen was taken to task by google for bundling google apps with his ROMs. They let you download the google apps you want, or none. If they allowed clean installs for stock google images and the customer could choose which Google services/apps to install factory resets wouldn't be an issue.
No, it's not the same thing. The whole point of a recovery image is that there is never a need to write to it in order to be able to fully use the system itself -- otherwise you'd 'contaminate' the recover image and your "factory reset" stops being what it literally says: a factory reset. And indeed, /system has this problem, as there are clearly cases (like when rooting) when you have to write to the /system partition for reasons that are very much not "because I want to change what happens upon a factory reset".
Rooting isn't exactly using the system as designed. In a normal Android system /system is read only unless mounted otherwise (which only really happens during updates).
They even (ab)use this to make seamless updates by creating a second /system partition, writing the update to that, then swapping over on next restart. If something goes wrong, they swap back to the first system partition.
In this manner, the /system partition is NEVER written to outside of creation.
Rooting is literally sidestepping this entire process to take full control over the system and mount /system as writable. Sure, you could probably make a /recovery, /system, and /data all different partitions, but now you are roughly doubling the amount of system data on the disk for not much of a reason.
> Rooting isn't exactly using the system as designed.
Rooting is very much using the system as designed. Google supports it and provides tools to enable it. Some apps on the Play Store require it. Does that mean everyone should root? No. Does this have any bearing on the fact that the recovery image should not be modified when rooting? No.
> They even (ab)use this to make seamless updates by creating a second /system partition, writing the update to that, then swapping over on next restart. If something goes wrong, they swap back to the first system partition.
If Google could provide a better way to root then this wouldn't be an issue. That they provide a suboptimal method isn't a defense here.
> In a normal Android system /system is read only unless mounted otherwise (which only really happens during updates).
I like how you contradict yourself in the span of 2 comments. First you said "Removing that app from the system partition won't give you more usable space without repartitioning", now you say that space is usable for installing updates. You just refuted your own point.
> In this manner, the /system partition is NEVER written to outside of creation.
In other manners, it IS written to outside of creation, and this is clearly due to the way they designed the system, not because modifying /system should actually alter the recovery image.
> Rooting is literally sidestepping this entire process to take full control over the system and mount /system as writable.
Yes, that's what it is, because it's necessary for some apps to be able to do what they do. The fact that they don't provide a better mechanism isn't a defense for the consequences of providing a poor mechanism.
> Sure, you could probably make a /recovery, /system, and /data all different partitions, but now you are roughly doubling the amount of data on the disk for not much of a reason.
That it's "not much of a reason" is very much your quite-subjective opinion. And there are better solutions than what you proposed here. And PCs already do this. But at this point you're changing the subject -- a reduction in space usage would not make your claim that "that's literally what disabling it does" any more true. It's simply false.
Google provides a very limited set of tools for it, really only meant for devs of devices.
By your line of reasoning Google has apps that don't work when rooted, so therefore they shouldn't allow it at all.
And i'm not contradicting or refuting myself, there are (oversimplified) 2 system partitions on Android when setup this way. It's a tradeoff they made and you can read more about the pros and cons at [0].
This is getting a bit aggressive for my tastes so this is probably my last reply, but the point i was trying to make is that most of android is designed around the fact that /system is read only and doesn't change (which is also a nice security buffer), and /data is where all user data sits, and to "factory reset" they wipe /data and nothing else.
It's absolutely a trade off to have /system do double duty like that, but one that I think most people are more than happy with as the most common complaint about the system is that people can't delete "system" apps entirely. And creating a 3rd copy of those apps on /recovery so they could be deleted from /system and /user isn't really "solving" the problem, just moving it back a little, while using up a LOT more space on the user's device.
On my Pixel 2, the only apps I can't disable are Settings, Phone, Messages, SIM toolkit, Pixel Launcher and Play Services. I can disable (not uninstall) rest of the Google apps that were pre-installed.
The Pixel is .7% of the smartphone market and is the Google device, so by default you're already in their ecosystem and you don't need all the spyware as apps.
The vast majority of the Android market, in the US at least I can assure you, has google or carrier based spyware that you can't delete or disable.
Unlike "Settings", the name is not "Play Services", but "Google Play Services". It makes sense that you shouldn't be able to disable literally everything that was built-in such as Settings (how else are you supposed to undo what you just did...) but the problem is that you can't disable preloaded Google apps (which includes Google Play Services).
Oh you may have misunderstood my comment. On my phone at least, there is an app named "Play Services" which I assume provides things like location services and other background Google platform APIs. You can disable other pre-loaded Google apps individually (Google Search/Assistant, GMail, etc).
FWIW, I too hate that there isn't a replacement for those Play Services. I'm so frustrated - Pixel launcher will not show temperature in Celsius unless I give it "Web and App Activity" permission.
And English Australia / English UK won't display Celsius by default without web permissions? (Granted, that would also mess with the display of calendar dates.)
I think I understand what's happening here. If I click the temperaure on launcher, it opens the Google Search app querying for "weather" - here it is in celsius.
Temperature units preference is saved in Google Search app. Pixel launcher, even though it shows the news cards from Search app, cannot show temperature in the units of my choice unless I give it the "Web and App activity" permission. Just Google things.
Play services makes sure that things like fine location services work on your phone. It can't be uninstalled or disabled because it's tied much deeper to the os than a normal app, and nothing else offers the same functionality that you can normally install. (There's competitors like microg but you can't install them without having an unlocked bootloader)
> Play services makes sure that things like fine location services work on your phone. It can't be uninstalled or disabled because it's tied much deeper to the os than a normal app, and nothing else offers the same functionality that you can normally install. (There's competitors like microg but you can't install them without having an unlocked bootloader)
Isn't that literally the point? When the complaint is that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving few viable alternative options, the fact that Google is tying itself to the OS and leaving fewer alternative options is more like an admission rather than a defense...
It goes deeper than that. Many (most?) Android apps depend on Play Services. If there were an option to remove it, it would basically be a "break most of my phone" option.
To make this viable, at a minimum, it should be possible to search for apps that don't depend on Play Services, so you could remove most of your apps and replace them with alternatives.
But I expect most users wouldn't do this, and so there is little incentive for most apps to stop depending on Play Services. The only real incentive to do it is to be able to publish the app on Amazon.
Oh the good old IE argument "but it is technically integrated to the OS and providing all kind of essential services, so we are not abusing our monopoly"
While it is not (can be removed/replaced, the limitations preventing to do that are completely artificial and this is probably playing a good role in what has been judged), and even if it was, things should have been bundled differently to begin with (if they can't, that can be considered a conscious decision potentially motivated by a desire to abuse a monopoly, so in all cases that should be redesigned)
So it's mostly same cause/same effects from an high level overview -- and I'm not surprised. Maybe the way to become compliant (after their pointless whining phase has passed) will even be similar? I'm not buying the business model argument. Google browser, play store and so over are now extremely well established and won't be abandoned by any kind of mass exodus any time soon. In ten years, they can be challenged, but that's the fucking POINT: practical competition should be allowed.
It's astonishing that everybody and their dog was scandalized by MS behavior in the time (and some even are today, despite present MS being quite different from the old one), while Google has somehow managed to be considered friendly regardless of the doing exactly the same shit, if not worse, while simultaneously even pretending that they are not evil. Well maybe evil is a strong word, and I can concede that they did not pretend they are not hypocrites :p
Playing devil's advocate here. I feel like Play Services is necessary evil. This is the only thing that's keeping the ecosystem from fragmenting further. Look at the OEMs update cycle. If not for Play Services which are updated independently from Android OS itself, app compatability would be a nightmare. There is nothing to replace it with. Nokia tried and failed.
Other thing is, if every OEM starts writing their own API for these services, app developers will have to write apps for each OEM because they for sure will not work with each other. We will go back to the days of Symbian where apps will come with a huge list of phones it is known to work with.
Or else, you get a gripe that (depending on the app and whether or not others depend on it) may or may not be a dark pattern: "If you disable a built-in app, other apps may misbehave. Your data will also be deleted."
It creeps up very quickly once you start installing site-wrapper apps. I consciously try to avoid those, but even a quick audit of my apps shows I have at least a few:
- Youtube
- Hacker News
- Reddit
- XDA-Developers
- Amazon
- My banking app
Pretty much all of those could just be a tab in my browser, but the convenience of properly-formatted text, easy searching, replying, etc pulls one towards the native app.
OEMs and carriers often put "their" (the Facebook app bundled on some Samsung phones can't be deleted, only disabled) apps on the system side of the fence...
A typical person installing 50 apps themselves is utter nonsense also. I know zero people who have done this, and it would be utterly opposite iOS behavior (where most people install 0-1 apps per month).
Maybe there are bots who install and then uninstall many apps. Those used to be fairly prevalent.
> A typical person installing 50 apps themselves is utter nonsense also. I know zero people who have done this, and it would be utterly opposite iOS behavior (where most people install 0-1 apps per month).
I just counted, and I have 128 apps on my Android phone (none are games). Some of those were pre-installed, but I installed the vast majority of them.
It wouldn't surprise me if this is something where iOS & Android users are opposite one another: iPhones are smart phones, whereas Android phones are computers with calling capabilities. The whole point of iOS is to communicate; the whole point of Android is to be a computer which fits in your pocket.
I'd love to know why at least three folks downvoted my comment. The original poster stated that he knows zero people who have installed 50 apps, so I offered myself up as an example of someone who's done so, and gone on to install more. Do people think I'm lying?
Did they object to my thought on iOS versus Android? Why? Do they think that an iPhone is a computer with calling capabilities? Do they think that Android phones are smart phones?
I'd really like to know what offended folks so much that three folks (at least) downvoted, and offended them so much they didn't even bother posting.
I'm not complaining about the downvotes, just genuinely curious what could possibly have been controversial.
EU's charges are a sham. I hope Google gives the EU regulators exactly what they deserve:
Google should outright stop licensing Android to manufacturers in the EU (like Apple), make the OS closed source (like Apple), disable side-loading apps (like Apple), purposefully make the mobile browser incompatible with W3C standards (like Apple) in an effort to drive developers & consumers to the app store, and slap a minimum price tag of $1000 on Pixel phones (like Apple).
Maybe then, the true value of choice will sink in.
I get your point and I know it’s a great way to reap those free internet points, but you’re being a little disingenuous with the Apple hate here. Apple never licensed out iOS to the EU or anywhere else. The kernel of iOS is open source. I think it’s a stretch to conclude that Apple purposefully makes their browser incompatible with web standards in any meaningful way to drive App Store revenue. And the minimum price of an iPhone is nowhere near $1000. They start at $350 retail.
I get your point, and deifying Apple with falsehoods is indeed a great way to score internet points. But touting Apple fandom as facts is disingenuous here.
> Apple never licensed out iOS to the EU or anywhere else:
I never implied it did.
> The kernel of iOS is open source.
Please link a ROM to load on my iPhone. I can give you a hundred for any popular Android device.
> I think it’s a stretch to conclude that Apple purposefully makes their browser incompatible with web standards in any meaningful way to drive App Store revenue.
There's ample evidence to the contrary, and statements from within Apple
> They start at $350 retail.
No - you can't confuse carrier subsidies and contracts with price.
> They start at $350 retail. No - you can't confuse carrier subsidies and contracts with price.
Well it’s a good thing I’m not talking about subsidizing pricing, then. An SE out of contract is $349. An iPhone 8 - a flagship phone - is $699, just a little more than a Pixel.
After all that effort to keep manufacturers from using alternative OSes, they should now hand them a strong reason to invest a lot in those? Doesn't sound very logical to me.
A good OS does not a win in the marketplace guarantee. Windows phone is a case in point.
BTW - the suggested response is indeed a logical reaction to EU's illogical charges. True choice is allowing phones @ $150 - $1500 to exist, customized for every customer segment in the marketplace. True choice is the ability to tinker with the underlying OS and ROM. True choice is the ability to side-load apps despite __insert_agency_here__ not blessing it. And Android empowers those choices.
It were the logical reaction if "as closed as possible" and "the current situation" were the only two possible states. And with your proposed EU-ban, Google would leave massive hole in the market for handset makers to fill with alternatives, in a market large enough to motivate such development. That doesn't sound like something for Google to want, I believe their market position is better than that.
Apple is not a monopolist (24% market share). Being the biggest operating system comes with responsibilities (in EU). If Google would pull Android away from Europe, other parties would take over as most consumers only buy less expensive phones. Microsoft for example would love to have this market.
I second this! The reasoning behind the decision is spelled out in plain english. I encourage everyone to read the EU decision (takes ~3 min) and form your own opinion.
This passage is an example:
Market dominance is, as such, not illegal under EU antitrust rules. However,
dominant companies have a special responsibility not to abuse their powerful
market position by restricting competition, either in the market where they
are dominant or in separate markets.
Google has engaged in three separate types of practices, which all had the aim
of cementing Google's dominant position in general internet search.
1. Illegal tying of Google's search and browser apps.
2. Illegal payments conditional on exclusive pre-installation of Google Search.
3. Illegal obstruction of distribution of competing Android OS forks.
They are downright lying. The animation on Pichai's talk tries to present removing the google chrome icon from the main screen as "uninstalling" it. Do they really think people are idiots?
For a long time I've been hoping to be able to pay for Google products so I can use them without being the product myself. And so this statement is sort of an answer to those prayers.
This is reminiscent of banks in the UK, who come out with direful warnings that they'll end free banking every time they're forced to lower their swingeing overdraft fees.
If it's suddenly gonna cost money, it was never really free before either.
Google is far and away the worst OSS maintainer, a lot of their allegedly OSS work is really just a code dump with all the real work being done behind closed doors.
This is preposterous. Android is more or less AOSP + Google Play services, and the latter are not free for manufacturers to use. There is a license fee. In addition devices need to pass a compatibility test suite (CTS) for them to be eligible for Google Play services. Similar requirements for using Google Pay.
In my personal opinion Android is abused by Chinese OEMs who want the cheapest free thing they can put together. They buy SoC solutions from Mediatek, Allwinner, etc. and the end user never get OS updates or security patches anyhow. The OEMs need to be forced to support what they have shipped.
I know it’s not going to happen, but part of me wishes this would allow Windows Phone to be viable.
It was such a great mobile OS for basic and not so basic functions. Unfortunately MS had no strategy and no independent serious developers spent their limited resources on it and it withered.
MS had worse than no strategy, they abandoned their strategy that was working. WP 8 was reasonably decent, and sold a lot of phones at the low-end ($50 for a Lumia 521 or later a 640 would get you a phone that basically worked, with a limited app catalog; vs a $50 Android that probably had low storage warnings on first boot). Then for WM 10, they had fired their QA team and re-orged away the phone team, and they delivered a stunningly poor OS release, but there were no cheap phones for it anyway -- the Lumia 650 was essentially spec equivalent to the 640, and they wanted app developers to start building 'universal' apps that would only work on Windows mobile 10, which I think still has fewer users than WP 8.
I left after installing WM10 on my 640 --- I couldn't go stomach going back to WP 8.1 with it's notification issues, but Edge was soooo bad, and there's no other browsers. :(
I haven't used Safari, but Edge would consistently not respond to pushing buttons like stop and back. It was prettier than mobile IE from WP 8 when it worked, and address bar on the bottom is clearly better than on top like most other mobile browsers, but on a platform with few apps, the browser has to just work. On larger pages, if you scrolled down far enough, the page would go all white.
Except that MS of all companies kept burning compatibility bridges. For all its warts, Android can still run apps that have not been updated in years (how smart it is to do so is a whole different debate). One would have thought MS would understand what an advantage this gives, as they have been doing the same on desktop for decades. But on mobile they keep screwing it up.
Unfortunately it seems like the EU is arguing that free software (with conditions) is illegal. And yet, in the US, we see defacto monopolies in ISPs double dipping on consumers and businesses all day long.
The fact that major economies are taking diametrically opposed viewpoints is going to continue to cause chaos for the foreseeable future...
Because they do not have a monopoly in market A and abuse that to get an advantage on market B, where in this case A is mobile market from low to high end and B is search/user tracking/analytics/advertising
Arguably Apple is doing a similar thing by bundling iMessage and iTunes (and probably others), both of which have plenty of competitors but probably have an inherent advantage on iOS because they're built-in.
Ubuntu is also bundling Firefox and some default applications but they are not abusing any dominant position, Apple is at least in EU a niche, it has a significant market only on high end/expensive devices.
Apple is doing a lot of bad things too and I hope the right for repair will become a reality and Apple is forced to let people fix their devices.
I guess it feels a bit weird to say "the most successful operating system in a given region isn't allowed to bundle any first-party apps, but all of the other ones are". They seem like different scales of the same thing, and maybe Android's case is only being seen as "abuse" because it's at a larger scale due to more marketshare.
Is not about bundling, if Google would sell it's own Pixel phone is OK, but if I want to make a contract with Google to sell my xPhone with Android the illegal part is when Google is forcing my hand to put Google apps on the phone and put the Google search on the home screen on all my xPhones but also on say my cheap xCrap devices. The problem here is also the Google search part, you use your dominance in mobile OS market to force people into your search service.
Also, Apple has like 15% market share in the EU. If anything, it's the FTC that may want to start looking for an anti-trust case against Apple soon, which I think has around 50% market share in the US.
Apple already does many things that could be considered "abusive behavior". They just "don't count" as much right now because you can't argue it has a "dominant position" in smartphones in the US. iOS and Android have about 50-50.
When Apple starts reaching 60-70%, however, that antitrust case could (and should) be made.
Agree, I would also would like EU and USA to stop the big companies buying the competition, like FB buying WhatsApp or Google buying YouTube, this makes impossible for competitors to appear when you consider the huge budget advantage of the big companies.
To an extent, that buying of companies is what keeps them in business. The current model of creating a company without a long-term plan for survival turns them into a money-sink and their only hope for survival is to be bought by a company with deep-pockets who needs a loss-leader.
YouTube, WhatsApp, Reddit - all examples of services that would have disappeared or rotted away if they hadn't been swallowed up.
I am not sure why WhatApp or Reddit would disappear, don't we have so many IRC and mailing lists that are still running, you do not need a crazy amount of servers and developers to keep things running.
I am not sure about YouTube, it would have survive in a fair competition, the problem is competing with giants that play in many markets is not fair
IRC and mailing lists are more pro-sumer oriented than the average app. They survive despite the app market, rather than because of it. They also aren't particularly profitable, except in limited circumstances.
Apps are more clearly aimed at the consumer, ie., people who aren't going to get into the technical details of connecting to a particular service and learning the commands.
I doubt we'd have the overwhelming plethora of services if the app market hadn't been created.
Then maybe we should let those companies go under. Someone else will come along and iterate on that idea, and given the benefit of seeing what happened before, they'll be in a better position to make themselves profitable.
The meaning is much the same as an engrossing thought or conversation: one that fully occupies your attention.
It is as engrossment rather than monopoly that Adam Smith discusses exclusive control.
Of trade with a region:
The moderate capital of the [Hudson Bay] company, which, it is said, does not exceed one hundred and ten thousand pounds, may besides be sufficient to enable them to engross the whole, or almost the whole, trade and surplus produce of the miserable, though extensive country, comprehended within their charter. No private adventurers, accordingly, have ever attempted to trade to that country in competition with them. This company, therefore, have always enjoyed an exclusive trade in fact, though they may have no right to it in law....
Of skilled labour:
Half a dozen wool-combers, perhaps, are necessary to keep a thousand spinners and weavers at work. By combining not to take apprentices they can not only engross the employment, but reduce the whole manufacture into a sort of slavery to themselves....
Of grain:
[I]t is scarce possible, even by the violence of law, to establish such an extensive monopoly with regard to corn; and, wherever the law leaves the trade free, it is of all commodities the least liable to be engrossed or monopolized by the force of a few large capitals, which buy up the greater part of it. Not only its value far exceeds what the capitals of a few private men are capable of purchasing, but, supposing they were capable of purchasing it, the manner in which it is produced renders this purchase practicable....
Of land:
Great tracts of uncultivated land were, in this manner, not only engrossed by particular families, but the possibility of their being divided again was as much as possible precluded for ever. It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver. In the disorderly times which gave birth to those barbarous institutions, the great proprietor was sufficiently employed in defending his own territories, or in extending his jurisdiction and authority over those of his neighbours. He had no leisure to attend to the cultivation and improvement of land....
What exact threshold defines "dominance" in the EU, because I see iPhones everywhere I go in Europe. Monopoly has a clear definition - no competitors. "Dominance" seems like a much trickier proposition. Apple clearly has enough market share in Europe to offer clear alternatives to Android devices if consumers want them. It's not like it has 2% market share or something.
And before anyone pipes up: the option for physical copies of games doesn't change anything. Games still require a cryptographic signature from their respective console makers. In a very real sense, the physical game market is no different to the App stores, other than a few implementation details (i.e. method of data transport; method of payment).
Because they're not abusing any position of theirs to compel OEMs to bundle more of their apps. They also don't have anywhere near a monopoly position.
I've owned multitude devices since original G1 till today, and every single of them allowed to disable Google apps. In fact, I have disabled most of them.
They cannot be uninstalled, because they are part of a partition that is read-only. It is read-only, because it doubles as a recovery/factory reset.
They do not represent security risk, because system ignores them. They do not get loaded, no process is ever created for them and they are not considered when broadcasting intents.
You cannot disable Google Play Services, because it is actually a framework, not app. Your only reasonable way to have it disabled is only after you persuade all the app authors not to use it. Good luck with that.
> They cannot be uninstalled, because they are part of a partition that is read-only.
So Google is lying in its press release, proving my point?
Also, I do not care on what partition they are installed. That’s a technical detail which cannot serve as justification for locking in users.
What isn’t a technical detail however is the fact that regular users do not know how to disable apps, because that option is hidden in the Settings menu and comes with scary warnings.
Also, there is no app uploaded on https://f-droid.org/ that depends on Google Play Services, so the point on persuading all app authors is obviously stretching it, since some of them have been persuaded already. Also this being about choice it’s pretty obvious that if I want to disable Google Play Services then I also want to avoid any app that depends on it.
On the security risk, I don’t know if those components get loaded or not. As long as that code is on my phone, I cannot trust it not to be executed at some point in time.
What if I enable that app by mistake? What if it gets enabled via the dozens of exploits that happen every year? Do you promise that it won’t ever be executed again? That’s not how security works.
> So Google is lying in its press release, proving my point?
Please point out where in the PR they are lying. To make it easier for you:
> you can easily disable or delete them,
Note the "disable or". Which is exactly the FIRST line of my first comment in this thread.
The /system partition is also not about locking in users. It has a specific technical reason. But I get it, you are not interesting in constructive debate, you want to "win".
Find someone else to discuss then, I'm interested only in rational discussion.
While I understand that the law is not required to be a mathematical statement and requires case by case interpretation, I wonder if these leaves several burning questions on the table:
1. Was it illegal for apple to force install apple maps on iOS users, stiffling competing maps apps?
2. Is it illegal for apple to not provide other browsers JIT capabilities, effectively forcing them to be a skin on top of Safari?
I understand that iOS has no market dominance. But if iOS reaches 60% shares in a country, can the country demand substantial changes to iOS to encourage competitors? 70%? 80%?. Does a company need to make its product more open as it starts dominating the market.
Also, how would such market segments be defined for market domination? Phones? Smart phones? Phones with a particular characteristics? Phones with a particular OS(as phone inter operability is widely within OSes only)
Not defending any side here, but would love to hear what I am missing here.
Edit: As the press release of the commission says "market for .... licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system.". It seems using this vocabulary even Apple can be branded a monopoly, dominant in "unlicensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the iOS mobile operating system". Then isn't even apple using their dominance of "app store for iOS" to dominate other market segments?
I didn't mean Apple, rather other attempts that all failed so far, such as Maemo/Moblin/Tizen etc.
On the other hand, even though Apple definitely is tracking users to some extent and has a large database of users, including their real names, addresses and other personal data, they don't have the technical means to build such a complex profile of each person as Google. Based just on your search and visit history Google knows more about us, our fears and secrets more than our partners. So it's in our best interests not to strengthen their position further.
I'm confused at how this is any different than how both android and ios embed siri and google assistant in over allowing other assistants to compete, or what about the fact that you need to log in with an apple/google account to really use the platforms in any meaningful way (for at least most android distributions).
Part of me wonders if the EU just has a problem with google, as they have charged them time and time again, when other platforms engaging in anti-competitive practices get away with it.
Are there other parties that want this, or are they just replaying Microsoft in the 1990s.
If they wanted to do something actually useful, they should take a look at privacy issues surrounding Android. It's like the damn thing was architected for maximum spreading of personal and behavioral data across apps.
I would love to Buy an Operating system for my Smartphone if it is well supported and maintained. Like buying OSX or Windows or a commercial Linux Version. Also i would like to see a third Player on the Market.
In what sense is Android "free" right now? Android—by which I mean the Android a consumer would recognise and expect—hasn't been "free" in any sense of the word for quite some time.
Possibly never. I recall some tech bloggers voicing puzzlement when early Android tablets didn't ship with Marketplace installed. Thing is that at the time Google insisted that all Android devices had to be fitted with a mobile network radio. End result was that they basically handed Apple the first runner advantage in the tablet market.
Why is Google shooting itself in the foot? Customers demands Google search, they really don’t need to force anyone to include it. I see miniscual losss - if at all - if they just didn’t had these restrictions. This is likely the dumbest thing they have done in a while and now Pitchai is doubling down for no apparent reason or benefit. His language actually looks so Microsofty circa 2000.
I am not sure why Google should not make EU consumers pay those $5B fine by increasing prices of Android OS and other Google services for EU region.
EU has become a parking lot for unelectable politicians who meddle with other people's life while themselves living at other people's expenses and this just another example of how EU will eventually simply break up.
> it sends a troubling signal in favor of proprietary systems over open platforms
Sorry, Sundar, but this signal was sent by you. Android users receive it in multiple ways when our phones nag us to turn on tracking options and your company builds a complex profile about all aspects of our lives. Yes, a proprietary non-tracking alternative starts to look more attractive.
For all intents and purposes Android is closed source and is not free. As for financials when you pay for your phone you are paying for it. Better remove the pretense and be closed.
The same drivers that are used on Android are not available on Linux. Linux is running on your phone but you can install or use it. The Arm-Google partnership pretend to be open but for all effective practical purposes are closed and this is just clever theatre masquerading as open.
Companies like Google have become experts at lulling people into a sense of complacency about open source and open platforms.
And what are they actually doing. They are using open source software to build global surveillance spyware platforms with pervasively misleading language and dark patterns. Perhaps it's time open source licenses consider a condition that they can't be used for surveillance and spyware.
Also Project Treble kind of made the Linux kernel on Android behave like a mikrokernel, with drivers being implemented as separated processes, using Android's IPC to talk with the kernel.
This puts a real price tag on the OS. I hope more policies do the same to email and other things. The hidden advertising cost is shitty because it is highly hidden.
Kay. I don't really see any issues here. They got a legitimate fine and now they might charge licensing. Maybe this will help open up the market a little.
he's bluffing. it makes no business sense for Google to charge customers or OEMs for Android. Android would lose market share.
it's not like the world was clamoring for Google to produce Android in the first place. Google is good at search and advertising. they weren't a mobile OS and dev tool company in 2006 and they're still not.
Android's market share is irrelevant to Google because it's a loss leader. They pay for it by encouraging usage of their other services which they monetize with ads. An Android with 100% market share where every handset forced users to use Bing would be worthless to them.
It's quite likely if these conditions were removed from the Android licenses that nothing would immediately change because there is no latent demand for Android devices with DuckDuckGo or Bing or OSM map apps. At least not in Europe. However, the principle remains that Google has no incentive to build Android if it gets used to funnel traffic to its own competitors, and especially it would be disastrous for developers if Android forked into many incompatible versions.
Hence the most likely outcome is that Android simply becomes closed source, and to access it you either have to agree to today's terms and bundle their services, or pay to cover the revenue Google feels like they might not get if you don't.
> Android's market share is irrelevant to Google because it's a loss leader
I disagree. Android market share is highly relevant to Google. Android is the platform where Google exerts its strongest ability to nudge/influence/cajole/incentivize users to use its money making services (e.g. search). If Android loses market share, Google loses money.
What's more, Android market share keeps Google in the game. Google pays Apple 3 billion each year to be included as the default search engine on iOS.
What would happen if Google did not have Android at all? What alternative would it have to paying Apple (and any other company with a competitive mobile OS) an ever-growing share of its search revenue? How would Google compete against Bing and others if, instead, Windows Mobile had Android's market share? Google would be in a weaker, less profitable, position.
The driving reason Google bothered to create Android in the first place was to stay relevant in an economy which was transitioning away from desktop and toward mobile.
Yes, exactly, Android's market share in and of itself is irrelevant to Google, it's only relevant when considering other products. If Google didn't have web search and ads, then Android's marketshare would be existential, but as it is, Android exists mostly to reduce TAC costs for other products. If they could eliminate TAC in some cheaper way than developing a whole OS they'd do it.
Android is already nonfree, in that it includes loads of proprietary bits. If Google starts trying to charge phone makers big bucks, that's just more incentive for Samsung to fork AOSP themselves.
Google doesn't want to see a fractured ecosystem they can't control, so I agree with the article that it's an empty bluff.
Google is working on a new Android kernel so they were planning in a long while to take full control and probably go closed source with newer Android versions.
I don't think that replacing Linux under the hood of Android will change anything. Most of Android is licensed under the Apache license, probably due to the alternative Java runtime they took initially from the Apache Foundation.
They sheer developer power Google has at hand to throw at Android development, including out-of-tree-kernel patchsets, means that it is a very significant effort to just keep pace with them, and the AOSP "code drops" come late and require major integration work.
If they wanted to switch to a closed-source model, they could have adopted that for the runtime a long time ago, still keeping the closed-source blob on top of the Linux kernel.
Maybe the EU decision will change the benefit balance of Android "being open source", and Google will go on with forking off / replacing the whole middleware, but I think that with their speed of Android development most commercially viable OEMs only have a chance to follow by subscribing to Google contracts (and maybe getting early access to new releases) anyway.
They do have the copyright to the code they wrote, but not to the code they took and changed (Apache Harmony, Linux kernel). They can relicense everything that originated from them, and provide it under a pure commercial license or dual-license it.
However, it might mean that they have to re-implement big parts of the Android runtime, or even do clean-room implementations by people not previously involved in those projects, to prevent legal attacks on the inevitably-similar code that results.
Great point. I already fully expected Google to make Fuchsia at least as closed as Chrome OS (not to be confused with Chromium OS, which nobody cares about, and Google ensures it remains in that state).
Plus, I think the 5-year agreement it made with China to keep Android open when it purchased Motorola expired last year.
So I think Google was already planning to close Android. It was just looking for a good public excuse to do it.
Did this story get demoted somehow? How/why, and why silently so? I thought I saw it on the front page but now it's on page 4, when it currently has 35 points in 1 hour, and there's nothing comparable on that page (everything else is much older or lower voted).
"Given Google’s dominance in search and browsers and the popularity of its many web services, Pichai’s warning looks more like a bluff to court popular opinion than a genuine threat that Android will no longer be free."
I wish these bloggers would keep their biases and unsubstantiated commentary to themselves.
This fine is an assault on open source, the fact linux didn't attain mainstream appeal on the desktop was largely due to the lack of condition and harmonization across distros.
In any other context fining an open source project for antitrust violations is absurd.
I don't see how telling Google not to force itself as the default preinstalled option on phones is an "assault on open source".
> the fact the linux didn't attaint mainstream appeal on the desktop was largely due to the lack of condition and harmonization across distros
Not sure what "condition and harmonization is", but if you mean the poor UI for normal people, then yes. I don't see the relevance of this to Google forcing itself onto people's phones.
> and the EU wants to doom android to the same fate.
It was literally a few days ago when I was wondering to myself how people were cool with Google search etc. coming preinstalled. I had no idea the EU was looking into this. As a result I don't have any reason to believe their goal is anything but fair competition.
Considering the cause of the fine is all of the non-open source bits Google adds on, I don't see how one can make a statement like that with a straight face.
"In any other context fining an open source project for antitrust violations is absurd."
They didn't fine the Android Open Source Project. They fined Google.
They are not fining an open source project. They are fining a company making bad rules about what others are allowed to do with said open source project, e.g. by forcing them to choose between using Google stuff everywhere or nowhere in their devices.
Yes, and if they sell AOSP-based devices they then can not sell any other device with the Google components.
Or sell a device using only some of the things Google wants to make mandatory, but replacing others with their own.
That way they keep AOSP-based products on the fringe, since only niche manufacturers can afford to make them, and stop manufacturers trying to make/integrate better replacements for Google services. That's anti-competitive, that's the problem.
Why it is assault on open source?
The problem is that Google bundles it's Chrome and search apps (which are not open source) together with android that is later installed on devices made my others.
At least that what I see in the article.
AOSP's position is nothing like that of Linux. For years now it's been held hostage by a mega-corporation that doesn't really want it to be open-source any more. Google didn't buy and build Android and then make it free out of idealism, they did it so Apple couldn't become a monopoly and lock Google search out of mobile. Now they've more than accomplished that, and if they had their way it would already be proprietary.
Probably what Pichai is talking about is charging a fee for Google Play Services, not AOSP. Although if they did decide to proprietize all future development work on AOSP, it would be interesting to see how the community would respond. It's possible we'd see a major fork and a revitalization of community work a la Linux, instead of the little garage forks we mostly have today.
Google is already well in the process of making everything they can proprietary. Browser, Calendar, Camera, Dialer, Gallery, Music Player, SMS and probably more - all left to basically bitrot in AOSP while Google pushes proprietary replacements as part of the gapps bundle loaded onto OEM phones.
The core of Android may be open source, but between so many API's being shoved into Google Play Services and AOSP apps being all but abandoned the writing is on the wall.
Exactly. They actually go one step further than that with the Google Services API's. Things like notifications and location can now go through the proprietary API's instead of the system ones, with special perks. This means that if you don't have Google Services, then even if you get your hands on a third-party APK without using the Play Store (hard enough as it is), things will sometimes just randomly break because API's are missing.
Android is the very opposition of Free Software. Google took the Linux Kernel, modified it, added some proprietary bits, and they're doing what they can to replace open components with their own proprietary versions, making a really open version of Android hardly usable and extremely difficult to build.
Charging manufacturers for using the operating system you built is a healthy business practice. "Giving it away" and building in dozens of tracking mechanisms is hardly ethical.
We all have different problems. I cannot install Facebook or Messenger on a Sony phone.
due to a permission, that used to be defined by Sony in pre-Android 7 and now is defined by Facebook, i.e. by app with different signature. The old permission definition still lingers on the phone and the only way to get rid of it is to reset the phone to factory settings. Which I'm obviously not going to do.
What phone are you using? I've had a Galaxy S3, S5, and now S7. I can (and have) uninstalled Facebook on all of them. None of them came with it installed?
The way Google's response is written is perhaps a sample of Pichai's application for White House Correspondent in the Trump administration.
The argument is so ill worded its mindbugling. When did "open platforms" become synonymous with bundling?
What the EU has done is call the bs in Google's speak.
@Pichai - if you and all your high concentration of PhDs can't come up with a better business model than tracking and mind-controlling people, then yes, charge. Charge what you think Android is worth. We will evaluate the offering against our liberty.
You'll see that they consistently say that iOS updates are always free. There is a reason they say that, it's not be accident or idle words.
It's because the idea of a free OS upgrade for non FOSS is non-standard. Android moving to paid, means they would be like the overwhelming majority of business models for OS updates (Windows, MacOS).
It also means that they were unable to successfully monetize/subsidize their OS over the long term - arguably the crowning achievement of Google - whereas Apple has been able to eat their own dogfood and make it more or less a singular product.
And then what happens when a new upgrade comes through? It's just a one time OEM installation cost for eg Samsung etc...? Your carrier going to bill you for the update?
The costs would get passed to the consumer no matter what though.
There might be 1'300 brands and 24'000 devices, but all are bound to the Google conditions. This is not choice.
Phone makers may be free to also pre-install competing apps alongside Googles, but they are not free to not install Googles app. This is not choice.
I'm using a Jolla phone. Its producer (afaik) is not allowed to support the Play Store without accepting the far reaching (now deemed illegal) conditions of Google. A severe hindrance of my choice.
What is this sentence about the rule "sends a troubling signal in favor of proprietary systems over open platforms"? The Google Play Services is closed source and required for quite some Android apps, is it?
Of course you intend to appeal. But from my point of view you deserve every cent of the fine!