Google has a near monopoly on smartphones--In my country Android has like 95% market share.
You can only abuse your dominant position if you have a dominant position, and Apple does not have one.
You can only abuse your dominant position if you have a dominant position, and Apple does not have one.
And if we're looking at e.g. "tablets", I wouldn't be surprised if they had something like 90% of the market, in some countries.
It's funny how Apple is simultaneously depicted "non-dominant player" and "the only mobile platform where you can make money", sometimes by the same people.
Hard to know since Amazon doesn’t release sales numbers.
Either way Apple isn’t doing anything to shut down tablet competitors other than making a great product at a price people seem to be willing to pay. There aren’t tons of lawsuits or requirements that retailers can’t sell competing devices.
For example, Apple only has 10-40%[1] of the smartphone market (i.e. market share), but they capture north of 80%[2] of the physical device sale profits. There have even been years where they captured more than 100% of the profits[3]..
The same goes for the app store: iOS owners are often more likely to pay for apps, but Android developers make up this difference by including ads and tracking, which isn't 'consumer spend' but still makes money.
[1] depends on who you ask
[2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/17/apple-grabs-86-of...
[3] https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/04/apple-smartphone-profit...
Apple has 100% market share in the iOS market. Due to that fact they’ve got exclusive control over a significant percentage of the population - consider that customers cannot install another OS on the hardware they’ve bought and they cannot move their iOS apps on another Android phone either.
To make an analogy consider that you’d complain about your local electricity provider having a monopoly and I’d tell you that you can always move to another city or country, there, problem solved, it was your fault for staying there.
And Linux has 100% market share in the desktop Linux market. But it probably doesn't count as a monopoly.
I do believe the significant market share of Apple smartphones is an issue, but as far as I know they haven't managed to make it a monopoly yet.
What I'd like Google to be investigated for in this Android case, and I don't think it was, is how the company bans virtually all forms of ad-blocking from the Play Store.
Adblockers are not illegal (quite the contrary), but they are a business conflict for Google. Given that Android is found to be a monopoly, Google should be much more restricted in how it decides to cut apps off from the Play Store, especially if those apps are a "problem" for its main business (just like VOIP apps once were for carriers, etc).
Then it's a choice on the part of manufacturers, not an obligation. Look at Amazon: they decide to do without.
I think it's noteworthy that the only counterexample you can find is a tech behemoth with an even larger market cap than Google. If this was a person with an analogous scenario to be "successful", aka put food on the table, this would clearly be negotiating under duress.
I would argue Kindles are largely successful because they don't compete with proprietary Android in any appreciable metric: Google-flavored Android barely even attempts to compete in the tablet market, and Kindles are e-readers first, and tablets second.
People want Android with Google Play store. Google won’t let you do that without restrictions the EU says are anticompetitive.
That isn't that far away from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v. Intel Corp. over Intel's exclusivity contracts.
MS had effectively the same rule too, didn’t they? Wasn’t that (one of) the reasons we didn’t see Linux as even a BTO option for the longest time?
Until 1994: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsofts-1994-consent...
Note that the MS one was different: OEMs paid license costs based on computers shipped (with/without Windows), whereas Google requires complete exclusivity if you ship one device with Google Play Store.
Thanks.
They’ve been pretty successful in the tablet market.
But go into anywhere that sells phones. Carrier store, Best Buy, Walmart, whatever. Find a single Android phone that DOESN’T have google services on it. I’d be surprised if you can.
People want Android. And by Android they largely mean the Google Play Store and related services.
“It’s an Android phone, but none of the apps you see advertised are available for it!” No normal user is going to be happy with AOSP.
The same analogy can be drawn from Microsoft and the desktop OS market in the 90s/00s. They had a monopoly Ewen though they didn't sell computers directly. They still strong-armed manufacturers, like Google is doing today.
any source for that?
https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/27/google-confirms-blo...
https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/04/google-announces-ma...
Also, you know, the article here and any evidence the EU produces against Google...
Though the sign of a true monopoly would be issues in trying to cancel the deal. Which is way easier with Android compared to many examples.
I’ve never heard that before as a definition and doubt it would stand up in a court.
Google will threaten to cancel your Play Services license if you ship services (that have nothing to do with android) competing with them. Classic case of harming competition by product tying IMHO.
Your options are to install Windows on every box, to install it on none (not really an option for big OEMs), or to be at a cost disadvantage to your competitors. In practice, it was "install Windows or lose a big chunk of your business".
AOSP by itself is pretty useless because it can't run any of the apps the public is interested in.