If the result here is cast support for Amazon video and YouTube working again, I'll take it. It's not like Amazon isn't doing the same thing.
This issue is the subject of the EU's next antitrust case expected to be settled this year.
Amazon then in return chose to not sell Google products which were intentionally blocked from supporting Kindle products, which is why they won't sell the Chromecast, for instance.
I do not think a company should be forced to preinstall a competitor's app. Imagine your Google Pixel being required to have the Windows Store installed. Wouldn't that be irritating?
What's even funnier, all the restrictions to Android recently aimed at solving battery life.. guess who the worst offender is: Google Play Services. Guess who's excluded from all the anti-competitive restrictions Google is sliding into Android: Google Play Services.
(Now to be fair you could also vendor your own framework services/components/whatever and delivery them with your build of Android, but Google certainly has the upper hand in that in order to be licensed to use googles framework services and thus their apps, you have to pass a set of compliance tests, among other things.)
Do you have a source for that? Because I'm pretty sure that's false. In fact, the Android 8.0 changelog even [explicitly says][1] that Play Services is affected by the new background location limitations:
> This behavior change affects all apps that receive location updates, including Google Play services.
[1]: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/android-8....
But it's good to see Google closing that gap because it's one of the ways naughty apps would piss in the pool for everyone else. And it's one of the criticisms a lot of people had against Google's upper hand.
That's not an arbitrary exception on Google's part though; the reason it's excluded is because Play Services targets Marshmallow, not Oreo, and the new background execution restrictions are currently only enforced for apps targeting Oreo (though there's a switch in settings to manually enforce them for individual apps, and you can flip that switch for Play Services if you want).
I'm looking at my battery stats and with 10% battery remaining, Google services has used 4% of the battery. So you're either being disingenuous or you have an issue with your device.
This is simply incorrect. You put out some facts about licensing Google apps but you apply this completely subjective line in front of it which makes it sound like Google actively did something. These licensing terms have been around for years and every company you can think of has agreed to the terms. They aren't that onerous.
This whole mess is entirely in Amazon's court. They made all of the decisions and made all of the moves. It's their call to do everything themselves and want to own every piece of the system. They weren't forced to. They want to.
Yes they are. Installing 20 google apps and placing them extremely prominently, forced google widgets, google has to be the only search, the only voice...
Google is putting these very strict rules on anyone that wants to use the play store, and being actively misleading about it because "android" is still "open".
If they want the benefits of being "open" then they should walk the walk and let all android devices use these free android apps.
Personally, I have no issue with Google's licensing. Why shouldn't they be able to ship their software how they want? At the end of the day most users don't care. I love FOSS when it comes to my own development and I couldn't imagine being a developer without access to so many FOSS libraries. However, I don't give a crap if my phone is fully open source and neither do vast majority of the other billion+ Android users
OK you clearly haven't read the licensing terms since most of this is bullshit.
The preinstalled apps don't have to be "extremely prominently" placed, and there is no forced google as the only voice.
Most of this you could trivially find out by just picking up a Samsung S8 which its own voice search (Bixby), and a home screen where the only Google app is Play Store. Even still they can (and do) then shove the other Google apps into its own Google folder in the app launcher.