[Update with Pricing] Google forces European Android OEMS to pay Up To $40 licensing fee per device for Google Apps

[Linus_torvalds]

26 minutes ago, LordOTaco said:

Actually isn't android mostly linux?

Not even close! Where is package manager? where are repositories? Where is functionality PC desktop linux/Sailfish have, where is true multitasking?

 

In Sailfish OS you have EVERYTHING normal PC linux has. Python, gcc, terminal, ssh, repositories, package manager, ALL the tools normal linux has "ls, useradd, mv, cp, cat, awk" i mean literly everything! You can run arch linux, or ubuntu, or manjaro by chrooting it and starting it's GUI on Sailfish OS. You can do ANYTHING (except upgrading kernel) on Sailfish OS. Knowing what you can do on true linux mobile OS like Sailfish i find it funny to call android linux.

25 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Firefox and Edge both have been far better than Chrome as far as my experience goes.

Firefox is crap in my experience for android. I have never used any other browser on my desktop linux though. Also Sailfish default browser is based on firefox.

[AlTech]

5 minutes ago, dtaflorida said:

Sounds like they're trying to make more competition. If the Play Store didn't come with every android phone, alternatives like Amazon's app store become a lot more viable alternative, and OEMs might see incentive to open their own app stores. I think this does make for more fertile ground for competition. Imagine a world filled with Amazon Fire phones... damn that's one dystopian world.

The problem is the Open Handset Alliance kind of stops most major Android OEMs from competing with Google's apps.

[dtaflorida]

11 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

The problem is the Open Handset Alliance kind of stops most major Android OEMs from competing with Google's apps.

Well that doesn't sound very open to me... 

 

To my knowledge most android phones sold in china don't come with Google Play store installed... or most if not all of these apps. 

[AlTech]

3 minutes ago, dtaflorida said:

Well that doesn't sound very open to me... 

It's run by Google and most of the major Android OEMs are part of it so ofc it's not open lol.

[asus killer]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

I think Android is okay. It's just too tied down to Google. Remove all the Google parts of it and then it's actually really amazing.

 

To clarify, even stock AOSP Android is too tied down to Google imho.

i have an android phone, still i prefer ios a lot more. personal subjective opinion of course

[ZacoAttaco]

I heard something a while back, OEMs can't choose what Google services they want? (May have been on WAN) So an OEM can't just choose Google maps and Google Chrome but don't not install Google Drive or Gmail. Google makes them take all or nothing, I guess this is why whenever you buy a new Android phone, it's already full on bloatware, Google as well as OEM apps...

[Misanthrope]

Well how do you go from:

 

Quote

Google forces European Android OEMS to pay licensing fee for Google Apps | Play Store, YouTube and more cost $$$?

 

When you know that:

 

Quote

The changes come in response to a July ruling by the European Commission, which fined the company $5 billion for antitrust violations and ordered it to stop “illegally tying” Chrome and search apps to Android.

 

It doesn't looks as if Google had a fucking choice at all other than just not including Apps that they really want to include to create their ecosystem.

[Tech Enthusiast]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

I'm not sure this was such a good idea and I think the European Comission should have forced Google to make all their Google Apps open source on Android.

 

Although that's probably an unpopular opinion.

1

That is not only unpopular but straight out delusional. 

You can't force a company to give away their products for free lol.

 

That being said: Kinda happy Google is doing this. The EU went too far. They opened up the most used OS on the planet for others, in order to allow more players in the market due to low costs. All they asked for was having their services preinstalled (but removeable!).

 

That was VERY LITTLE to ask from Google and they still got charged for that. The only logical step was to just flat out not make it open anymore, but letting OEMs pay.

Sure, it will reduce competition, but that is what the EU wanted, right? I mean,... they knew this was going to happen, right?

 

Just sad that I have to pay a premium for this satisfaction since I am from the EU, but still: Happy they are lifting the middle finger to these crazy silly EU courts.

[paddy-stone]

Am I missing something here, the OEMs don't need to bundle any if this except the play store, the user can then just DL the apps for free anyway if they want them... this seems like a better way to me personally. Plus you can sideload apps anyway even if they aren't bundled.

Maybe I didn't read it correctly, but this seems nonsensical as it won't stop the end user from enjoying googles apps if that is their preference, and the OEMs don't get anything by including them anyway, right?

[AlTech]

Just now, Tech Enthusiast said:

That is not only unpopular but straight out delusional. 

You can't force a company to give away their products for free lol.

 

That being said: Kinda happy Google is doing this. The EU went too far. They opened up the most used OS on the planet for others, in order to allow more players in the market due to low costs. All they asked for was having their services preinstalled (but removeable!).

 

That was VERY LITTLE to ask from Google and they still got charged for that. The only logical step was to just flat out not make it open anymore, but letting OEMs pay. 

Sure, it will reduce competition, but that is what the EU wanted, right? I mean,... they knew this was going to happen, right?

 

Just sad that I have to pay a premium for this satisfaction since I am from the EU, but still: Happy they are lifting the middle finger to these crazy silly EU courts.

I think you're confused.

 

The EU didn't want Google to pre-install these apps on Android Devices by default.

 

So now technically OEMs need to opt in to it.

[suicidalfranco]

basically rip any chance of Euro countries attempting to get their own smartphone scene, as if it wasn't already hard enough to compete against the chinese

[Mihle]

16 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

basically rip any chance of Euro countries attempting to get their own smartphone scene, as if it wasn't already hard enough to compete against the chinese

This isn't just for phone companies in EU/EEA, it's for all phone OEMs that sell there from my understanding. So Chinese companies and Samsung also have to if they officially sell phone here.

[Mihle]

This was not quite what I was expecting.

 

What I expected they would do is that everything is free if you have search chrome and play store (the stuff Google earn most money on) or if you just have those three, but if you cut out one of the three then they have to pay to also keep the others.

[Trixanity]

1 minute ago, Mihle said:

This isn't just for phone companies in EU/EEA, it's for all phone OEMs that sell there from my understanding. So Chinese companies and Samsung also have to if they officially sell phone here.

Indeed it is.

It's about selling to the market, not about where the product is made or the company is located. Otherwise there'd be plenty of loopholes. 

 

The only relevant EU company I can think of at the top of my head is HMD Global so it would be a useless gesture if that was the case.

[Commodus]

2 hours ago, mate_mate91 said:

Not even close! Where is package manager? where are repositories? Where is functionality PC desktop linux/Sailfish have, where is true multitasking?

 

In Sailfish OS you have EVERYTHING normal PC linux has. Python, gcc, terminal, ssh, repositories, package manager, ALL the tools normal linux has "ls, useradd, mv, cp, cat, awk" i mean literly everything! You can run arch linux, or ubuntu, or manjaro by chrooting it and starting it's GUI on Sailfish OS. You can do ANYTHING (except upgrading kernel) on Sailfish OS. Knowing what you can do on true linux mobile OS like Sailfish i find it funny to call android linux.

Firefox is crap in my experience for android. I have never used any other browser on my desktop linux though. Also Sailfish default browser is based on firefox.

I get what you're saying, but that's not what everyone is talking about.  It's Linux as in the core code, not the software features.  The freedom of Linux is that you're not forced to do everything the same way with every distribution.  And besides, in real life you can do more with Android than you can with Sailfish (and yes, I know -- I'm one of those few North Americans who's actually used Sailfish).

[Curufinwe_wins]

This is stupid. So EU lets apple do this and more because Apple has a true monopoly on all this through vertical integration, but because Google let's them do it for free in exchange for chrome and play store, its suddenly not ok?

 

Like do you guys not realize the hypocrisy there right?

 

Half the complaints about android are that the experience isnt unified, but EU wants to prevent Google from unifying the experience?

 

This is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And some dumb idiots think the solution is somehow forcing a company to give up its IP and take everything open source? Are you fng kidding me?

 

 

Edit: look. I'm as pro EU as anyone out there. This is just fng stupid.

[Curufinwe_wins]

2 hours ago, dtaflorida said:

Sounds like they're trying to make more competition. If the Play Store didn't come with every android phone, alternatives like Amazon's app store become a lot more viable alternative, and OEMs might see incentive to open their own app stores. I think this does make for more fertile ground for competition. Imagine a world filled with Amazon Fire phones... damn that's one dystopian world.

Amazon does more content locking than Google does! By far. Google makes it easy to use and install Amazon apps, while Amazon does every single thing in their power to prevent you from installing play store and similar. 

 

This is awful and stupid and further segmentation of a system that needs less segmentation not more.

[ZacoAttaco]

2 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

Am I missing something here, the OEMs don't need to bundle any if this except the play store, the user can then just DL the apps for free anyway if they want them... this seems like a better way to me personally. Plus you can sideload apps anyway even if they aren't bundled.

Maybe I didn't read it correctly, but this seems nonsensical as it won't stop the end user from enjoying googles apps if that is their preference, and the OEMs don't get anything by including them anyway, right?

From what I understand, Google make them bundle everything, so they can choose to have Google Play on it's own but as soon as they say want Google Calendar it forces them to take Gmail, Maps, Drive etc. So it's an all or nothing approach here.

 

Also, how did thread turn into a debate about Linux? All we need is someone to bring up how Intel's measurement of TDP is inaccurate and this thread will be going for days  

I'm joking of course, I enjoy it. I'm here to talk about tech and that's what happens 

[AlTech]

1 hour ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

This is stupid. So EU lets apple do this and more because Apple has a true monopoly on all this through vertical integration, but because Google let's them do it for free in exchange for chrome and play store, its suddenly not ok?

 

Like do you guys not realize the hypocrisy there right?

 

Half the complaints about android are that the experience isnt unified

Respectfully, I disagree. Samsung devices have a consistent and unified experience and Google Pixel devices have a consistent and unified experience.

 

Of course most Android devices won't all have the same experience. It's like saying you want all cars to have the same controls and same features and all of them to be manuals or all of them to be automatics.

1 hour ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

some dumb idiots think the solution is somehow forcing a company to give up its IP and take everything open source? Are you fng kidding me?

Well, in my defence, Android AOSP is open source.

 

The only thing stopping Google from bundling their apps natively in AOSP other than the EU Comission is the fact that Google Apps are proprietary.

[yolosnail]

So let me get this straight.

 

Google was giving it's apps away for free to OEMs on the condition that they install all of Google's apps.

The EU saw this and was like 'oh no, they can't do that. It's anti competitive' and give Google a $5 billion fine.

Now Google can't just give away the apps for free and has started charging OEMS for installing them

 

Even with these fees in place, it's still in the OEMs best interests to pay the fees to Google to preinstall their apps, because even with literally all the money they have, the best virtual assistant Samsung could come up with was Bixby! And don't even get me started on their Calendar app, although I do like their messaging app, why doesn't Android Messages have scheduling!

 

The first thing I do when I get a new phone is disable all the OEM apps, and make the Google equivalents the default, not because I like Google (I really don't), but because most OEM apps are, to put it bluntly, sh!t. Well, that's not strictly true, I also install Edge, because it's so much better for one handed use. Who thought it was a good idea to put everything at the top of the screen 

 

if anything, all they've done is make the market even less competitive.

[AlTech]

2 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

So let me get this straight.

 

Google was giving it's apps away for free to OEMs on the condition that they install all of Google's apps.

Also, those OEMs had to sign legal paperwork and Google had to approve of the device before they allowed it. But yes.

[Drak3]

34 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

the best virtual assistant Samsung could come up with was Bixby!

You say that like Google's is better. It isn't, they're all shit.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

5 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Yes but most people don't know how to install and wouldn't want to install it that way.

Even better.

[ZacoAttaco]

14 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

You say that like Google's is better. It isn't, they're all shit.

And most of them haven't gotten worse, I feel like Siri was better 3 or 4 years ago...

[Drak3]

Just now, ZacoAttaco said:

And most of them haven't gotten worse

They haven't. They've always been shit.