I remember the browser situation and how they very nearly had Microsoft split in two, with the help I’d the US government if I recall. I can appreciate anti competitive moves, but when you as a user have the option to put on what you want it does seem strange to place multi billion fines for someone giving you a browser, and most people would use Chrome on android anyway.
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Google Criticizes EU Regulators for Ignoring Apple in Bid to Get $5.1 Billion Antitrust Fine Annulled
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I remember the browser situation and how they very nearly had Microsoft split in two, with the help I’d the US government if I recall. I can appreciate anti competitive moves, but when you as a user have the option to put on what you want it does seem strange to place multi billion fines for someone giving you a browser, and most people would use Chrome on android anyway.
Absolutely, I'm just pointing out that it's ironic to point out Google making a browser as a reply to a thread about Apple when for a long time Chromium was much closer to WebKit until they decided to fork and move away. I still find it funny that the browser wars were essentially won by the descendants of KDE now that Edge is also Chromium based. Never would have picked that when I was complaining about Konqueror rendering things weirdly all of those years ago. Similarly the OS is not entirely of their own lineage and that goes for both parties.
Apple also contribute out to many of those projects as well. Their XNU kernel is a derivative of Mach from the older BSD's but they've picked up various improvements from FreeBSD with DTrace being one of the cooler ones. Apple are significant contributors to LLVM and if I remember correctly open sourced LLDB from internally. Apple aren't the best members of the open source ecosystem but they're also not out tooting their horn on it either.
Dunno from where you got that story, but just for the sake of your reality check:
Until the EU tackles tax avoidance, big companies will keep getting away with it | Aidan Regan
Ireland may not have given Apple illegal state aid, but the system still needs to change, says Aidan Regan, a professor at UCD’s School of Politics and International Relationswww.theguardian.com
Yeah, many Companies have subsidiaries in Ireland, but simply to avoid tax.
Of course they're there to avoid tax, that's the unique tax value proposition I was referring to but they're still bringing money out of the various countries around the world into the EU.
They did force it. That is why google lost the lawsuit. Their contracts are illegal mandating manufacturers prioritize their programs if they want to provide the play store etc
They are free to do so. And I think developers should be free to ad an Apple Pay button instead of the in app purchase option
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It makes a lot of sense. A company doesn’t force something without it making financial sense. Today windows media player is barely used. Same with internet explorer as free competition.
and why are users using chrome? Is it because it’s the best or out of convenience as it’s already there on every Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Huawei etc phone?
It’s okey if it’s on a pixel phone as it’s owned by google. And it’s okey safari is on iPhone as it’s owned by apple.
They are forced by their contract terms. They can’t bundle google play store without including everything else. They can’t include google chrome without everything else etc. this is illegal and they have been found guilty of this now.
EU is not USA where you allow companies to do whatever they want untill they **** up the market.
So Google isn't allowed to say if you want to buy 1 app you have to buy them all? As in they are a package deal, no ala carte?
Still not seeing where they are forced to include any play services at all. Amazon is using Android and there are 0 Google Play Services in sight on their devices. Same with Samsung wrt Tizen.
And this applies to programs.
apple can’t force their own apps over third part ones(soon) google can’t force manufacturers to use only google apps.
we have about 4 big web browsers. Safari, chrome, edge and Firefox.
Microsoft edge did something interesting by making a fork from chromium that is Better than google chrome
Because android is an open source product.
No, they aren’t allowed to have all or nothing deal as they have a market dominating position. They are free to do as they wish on their own phones, but aren’t allowed to force other manufacturers to use all their services as they are not related in any way and works independently.
it would be different if they are needed( not artificially needed) and not in the way Microsoft made in the beginning internet explorer a part of the OS, making it impossible to remove and automatically domainate as the default option and not for actually being good
Google has increasingly moved a lot of their products and services into their Google Mobile Services bundle. As an end user of Android, you used to be able to download it but OEMs need a license to distribute it. GMS includes a lot of stuff that most people consider "Android" including Search, Chrome, YouTube, Play Store, Drive, Gmail, Maps and Photos. Google have also been moving a lot of their APIs out of the core of AOSP and into their GMS SDK bundle with I think the most important one being Maps but also stuff like Google Sign in, Pay, Cast, WearOS support and I think even some extended location APIs are in there. This means that for an OEM they have to decide if they want to ship an Android phone where none of the apps will work (because they rely on these Play Store APIs) making their device less competitive or paying Google to license their Mobile Services bundle.
Amazon use Android and you're right they don't license Google Mobile Services, they also have a Google Map polyfill layer that they implement to make up for not having the real deal available. If you've ever had the misfortune of working with something that looks like the same API but with different quirks, you start to realise much effort it is to do that...and that's coming from Amazon who should have enough resources to put behind it. Similarly Samsung has for years been working to build up a parallel ecosystem to make this work but even then it's not always the greatest. Supporting those platforms is a lot of work for app developers and they're not going to bother supporting the odd ball devices that don't have this. The exception seems to be the Chinese ecosystem but they also have all in one app models where something like WeChat is an app but also let's you run "apps" inside of it as well - a platform on a platform if you will. The Chinese ecosystem never really had access to Google's services anyway and were forced to build up without it but of course that's a target market of a billion people.
I think some of the challenge for Google is that they've moved a bunch of functionality out of AOSP into the Play Store and related APIs. Partially this was Google's way of dealing with the fragmentation problem. However since this moved a lot of what might be considered relatively core functionality of Android essentially behind a paywall, I think that contributes to the EU's findings here because OEMs are now stuck "buying" the extra services which are then tied into Google's broader ecosystem.
To be clear, I'm not sure I agree with the EU but I do understand their basis and it's relatively consistent with what they've done to Microsoft previously.
