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Google Charging OEMs Licensing Fees For Play Store

Posted by timothy on from the say-those-were-good-free-pills dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google has begun charging OEMs for access to its proprietary Play Store applications for Android though the reported amount is as low as 75c per device. Between charging OEMs for Google Play apps, showing ads within these apps (Search, Maps and GMail) and profiling users with the data it collects this does show that Google is willing to leverage their stranglehold on the mobile market to control and monetize wherever it can. Add that these proprietary applications and the proprietary Google Play Services are the primary areas for Android innovation and development and you end up with an operating system that is less and less 'free' in the freedom and cost senses of the word."

2 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Google already has a noose on manufacturers by mlts · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are the SELinux policies that got checked into 4.5 a few days ago which make it impossible for even a program running as root to extract and run files in the /data filesystem. Not an impossible task, but it will require all root apps to be re-engineered.

    I don't think Google did this to lock out root apps, but plug some vulnerabilities, but there is a lot of bellyaching about this. It would be nice to have some switch to allow root apps (or just the su binary) to have their own SELinux security contexts, or a way to turn SELinux off without changing kernel arguments.

  2. Re:What if Samsung threatens to fork? by crashumbc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And the fact that Samasung, is working VERY hard to replace all the Google apps with their own versions.

    calendar, googleNow, and mail ALL are either off or not installed by default on the S4

    S-voice
    Scalender
    and plain mail being the defaults

    It will be interesting to see what Samsung does on the S5 (openmaps maybe?)

    Samsung WILL either switch to Tizen OR fork Android in the next couple years, its coming...

    Personally, I hate the Samsung apps, I'll never buy another unless I can get a version without touchwiz(horrible) and Samsung's crapware