Slashdot Mirror
Google App Suite Costs as Much as $40 Per Phone Under New EU Android Deal (theverge.com)
Android manufacturers will have to pay Google a surprisingly high cost in Europe in order to include Google's Play Store and other mobile apps on their devices, according to documents obtained by The Verge. From the report: A confidential fee schedule shows costs as high as $40 per device to install the "Google Mobile Services" suite of apps, which includes the Google Play Store. The new fees vary depending on country and device type, and it would apply to devices activated on or after February 1st, 2019. But phone manufacturers may not actually have to shoulder that cost: Google is also offering separate agreements to cover some or all of the licensing costs for companies that choose to install Chrome and Google search on their devices as well, according to a person familiar with the terms. Google declined to comment.
... I thought regulation didn't cost anything, and you could just mandate goodness for free?
I was worried that consumers were not paying enough to Google for their phones. Fortunately, the EU has fixed the glitch.
So the brits can spend the money they saved on going to the dentist. Lol, who am I kidding?
And will Google take legal action?
I will be wiping Google from my phone next month with MicroG. They have worn out their welcome.
Though there are of course games being played here, much in the same way Microsoft did in the 90s. It could easily go the other way in practice, Google pay Apple billions to put their search engine in iOS Safari, so they think it has value. These prices are being set to make a political point.
As much as the more hysterical American /. contingent would prefer their companies to do what they want throughout the world, and the EU is flawed when it comes to regulation, do we really want Google to be able to do anything it wants? There has to be some oversight, so, what?
... and quietly point users at third party resources for installing such themselves? Sure works for third party ROMs like LineageOS.
Is there a vendor that sells Android phones with Lineage OS? Then the user can install Google apps as needed.
Sounds to me like Google really didn't like the EU hampering their vertical integration plans and are retaliating by raising the costs of smartphones to people living in the EU area. Then again if you are a company with a motto as benign as "Don't be evil" only to get rid of it then retaliation is probably going to be your standard response to consumer protection laws being enforced.
The specific number seems to be based on the idea that they're going to be losing all revenue from advertising and datamining operations and are simply pulling in that revenue directly from users as a single up-front payment. For comparison's sake Facebook's per-user revenues were about $20 in 2017 so that's probably two year's revenue from datamining and in-app advertising trough Google APIs.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
and the Google spyware (collecting WiFi info, e-mail info, DNS lookups, voice and camera recordings, text messages etc.) has to be removed as well.
It means we will get phones without all the forced Google stuff. Great!
I am already happy.
I rather have a price on something that I will not buy than having to pay with my privacy for something I do not want in the first place.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's quite a "fuck-you-and-your-EU-antitrust-order" plus "thank you for strengthening our browser and search engine monopoly you bunch of fucking EU morons" combo.
#DeleteFacebook
Smuggling things in to Europe from the UK.
It is like it is the 70s all over again!
I wonder if Windows 10 mobile starts rising from the dead over this.
If I remember correctly it's licensing fee was cheaper than $40 and just about every android phone could run it.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
No, Samantha, that's not revenge. That's the cost of doing business. Your holy bureaucracy decided that free was bad, so now you must be charged, as your holy bureaucrats must be paid a tax on what you must be charged. This isn't a petty revenge, it's a pretty reasonable estimate of the value of the software.
Now the Europeans are paying the cost of GDPR and the unbundling case. I'm not saying the browser unbundling or GDPR are bad, but to say it happens at no cost is just being naive. I hope it was worth it for them.
No good deed goes unpunished.
So as long as you bundle our closed source spyware (Chrome, etc) you don't have to pay the licensing cost. Sounds about right for malware vendors.
This, right here, is what the Cyanogenmod team could have used before they got crushed.
There's a hell of an opportunity for one of Google's competitors (Amazon, perhaps?) to jam their foot in the very-slightly-opened door, and kick like hell.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Now you have that fair competition you wished for explicitly.
Selling licences and such is a clever way to reduce and avoid taxes - legally.
But there is a hitch - it must be arms lengh, and the valuations fair. Or the valuations so complicated the tax authorities will OK it because some dumber tax authority alrready did.
Now if Google reckons $40 or so - then their deal when Alphabet was done looks mighty undervalued and contestable. Now transfer payment have visibility - let the audits begin.
The right kind of oversight would be limiting what kind of private user information Google collects, or at least forcing them to disclose it. The EU kind of oversight is just trying to handicap Google so a European competitor (hahahahaha) can take its place and do the exact same evil that Google does except while paying EU taxes.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
they probably could not just give this away even if they wanted too. if they are charging carriers for android and access to the play store then they cant just offer it free to others. chances are many carriers have most favored nation type contracts that says google will always offer it to them at the lowest price it is offered to anyone else.
when you sign a contract like that you dont care what google charges you because you can pass the cost to the consumer when all you competitirs pay the same.
microsoft did thisfor years requiring pc makers to install the OS on every computer if they wanted it on any computer. it wasn't free but it became a cost for the computer that others had to pay too.
don't be evil google just became what it hated-- microsoft.
now they are being forced to debundle it we learn what andriod app suites actually cost the consumer
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The oldest trick in the book if you can't give away stuff for free.
It is not up to you what comes on your phone. It is up to the manufacturer.
The question you need to ask is, do you seriously think Samsung, LG, Huawei, etc. are going to go to the trouble of building, packaging, and selling a "Google-free" phone that costs $40 more, for the 0.1% of customers who want said phone?
No, they will not.
It will cost as much as Google can get away with. The $40 per device figure is just an estimate that may, or may not, pan out in the real world.
You can already install LineageOS without Google, then load it with a full suite of Amazon services. The EU just made a family of Amazon phones possible.
What about Microsoft? There are already a full suite of integration apps for OneDrive, Outlook et al. Some of these depend upon gapps, but a Microsoft Android is surely not far out of reach.
What about Samsung? Every Galaxy that I've seen has a suite of Samsung apps that duplicate Google functionality.
What if all of these players unite to displace Google in the EU? Would that be good for consumers? Possibly.
Not everyone wants Google on their phone. If you offer people the choice of Google play and services, or AOSP with a more limited app store but double the battery life, then you might be surprised at how many takers there are. I have a gapps-free lineage on my Oppo Find 7, and get everything I need from f-droid or via yalp. And I have better battery life than when the phone was brand new several years ago.
Just keep fining them till they see the light. Few billions per month would do the trick.
When the EU decided Google couldn't link to online stories with excerpts? And Google stopped linking to their newspapers. And viewership fell through the fucking floor? And then they wanted to pass laws saying that Google HAD to link to their stories, and HAD to pay for them?
It's the same thing all over again. The EU has this idea that they have a right to extract money from Google, Apple, etc.
I for one welcome our new Microsoft-like overlords.
If you want the "clean" gapps, you need to pay $40.
But we can pay you $40 to install all the crapware that used to come with it.
I don't really think any manufacturer will want to add $40 to the cost of a phone. Especially considering that Google crapware is not that crappy and that many customers actually want it.