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Europe Is Going After Google For Anti-Competitive Behavior With Android
Google now faces more competition charges in the European Union. The EU has accused Google of skewing the market against competitors with its Android mobile operating system. The 28-member state bloc's antitrust commissioner concluded in a preliminary decision that the search giant has abused its dominant position in the market by imposing restrictions on Android device makers. "What we found is that Google pursues an overall strategy on mobile devices to protect and expand its dominant position in internet search," said Margrethe Vestager, the EU competition chief. "The commission is concerned that Google's behaviour has harmed consumers by restricting competition and innovation," she added. "Rival search engines and mobile operating systems have not been able to compete on their merits. This is not good." Google has three months to respond to the aforementioned charges. The New York Times reports: Europe's antitrust charges might not necessarily lead to financial or other penalties against Google. If it is found to have broken the region's rules, though, the company may face fines of up to 10 percent of its global revenue, or roughly $7 billion, the maximum allowable amount. Google denies that it has broken European competition rules, saying that its dealings with cellphone manufacturers like Samsung and HTC, among others, are voluntary, and that rival mobile services are readily available on its Android software.According to EU, Google has breached antitrust rules by:1. requiring manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google's Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps; 2. preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing operating systems based on the Android open source code; 3. giving financial incentives to manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-install Google Search on their devices."The joke in Google's cafeteria today will be "let them use bing," said Andrew Parker, VC. "So disappointing that browser dominance on Android is the only thing that the EU can get worked up about," Blaine Cook, co-founder of Poetica noted. "The European Commission's statement of objections against Android lends further credibility to Oracle's $9B copyright claim," Florian Mueller, the founder of FOSS Patents blog wrote.
Which part of "allows phone manufacturers/carriers to change the default search engine or browser" did you not understand?
Users on Android can change both the search engine and the browser if they like.
Google's lock in system bases not on the google-owned apps (they are just a few, and yes they are very much used by users, but I guess people can come up with an alternative). The main reason to be locked in to Google is their proprietary APIs they offer to app developers. You can't simply take an apk and publish it on an alternative market, if there are no gapps installed on the device, most of the apps won't work.
I don't see that.
Looking at the APIs in question, I see a pretty extensive list, but it's pretty much all just stuff to interact with Google services. There are APIs for:
Google ads
Google analytics
Google search integration (AppIndexing)
Google account authentication
Google cast devices
Google drive integration
Google fit integration
Google games integration
Google cloud messaging integration
Google location services
Google maps integration
Google street view integration
Google+ integration
Google vision integration (server-based service for doing object recognition)
Google wallet integration
Wear integration
Only the last item (Wear integration) isn't obviously tied to some Google server-side systems. And while the above list is a pretty useful set of services for apps that want to use them, there are lots and lots of apps that have absolutely no need for any of the above... with one exception. I suspect what breaks most apps that don't work on non-GMS devices is the lack of the ads API. But there are third-party ads libraries which wrap the GMS ads API as well as other ads APIs so that app developers who don't want to be tied to Google only (and many do like to use other ad networks, so there's a reason for this other than independence of GMS APIs) can use those. Thanks to the run-time class loading and introspection features of Java, it's fairly easy to write code that checks whether a particular class (e.g. com.google.android.gms.ads.MobileAds) is present, and to then do something more useful than crashing if it's not and AFAIK all of the ads aggregation APIs do that.
My perception is that Google tries hard to ensure that as much as possible goes into the core system, and as little as possible goes into the GMS APIs. The exceptions are (a) things that are inherently tied to Google services and (b) things that Google wants to be able to update on its own (e.g. WebView). That second category is stuff that Google will move back to the core system if and when OEMs fix their update process problems, I expect.
(Disclosure: I'm a Google Android engineer. Note that I'm carefully *not* addressing the topic of the EU anti-trust investigation, and I will not, for obvious reasons.)