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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Google does not sell (much) smartphones. If you have several manufacturers selling Android smartphones where is the monopoly coming from?

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To be successful, any Android phone needs the Google Play Store. And to get the rights to ship the Play Store, you (as a manufacturer) need to preinstall dozens of Google system apps and services. That way, Google has the total control (therefore monopoly) over the experience of nearly every single Android phone.

> To be successful

Then it's a choice on the part of manufacturers, not an obligation. Look at Amazon: they decide to do without.

To be successful, you need to breathe. I will now remove all oxygen from the room. It's your choice, not an obligation, to then negotiate with me to provide oxygen. Unfortunately for you, there are no other oxygen providers to negotiate with. But you could, after all, grab some water and generate your own oxygen...

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.

Yes, the Fire Phone was a stunning success, and clearly evidence you can compete with Google's proprietary Android offering with your own fork. /s

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.

Following that logic, it would be impossible to dominate an OS market since an OEM always would be free to write their own.

Microsoft didn’t sell PCs in the 90s either.

People want Android with Google Play store. Google won’t let you do that without restrictions the EU says are anticompetitive.

They also didn't give away the source code... Anyone can ship a phone without the Google Play store, but almost no one wants to buy one. Check out the Amazon Fire Phone as an example, backed by one of the biggest companies in the world and you can fit the number of Fire Phone users in a small room and still have lots of room left over.

No, not anyone can ship a phone without the Google Play Store: if you ship one device with it, all your devices must ship with it.

That isn't that far away from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v. Intel Corp. over Intel's exclusivity contracts.

Really? Didn’t know they did that.

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?

> 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.

I thought the MS one was cost based. “It’s nice and cheap until you sell one OS/2 box.”

Thanks.

Honestly there were so many things wrong with the fire phone I dont think adding Google Play would have made any real difference.

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.

Not a single Android phone in China ships with Google Play. So alternatives do exist!

They push their OS, which requires fees from and compliances with manufacturers.

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.

> like Google is doing today.

any source for that?

Here are some examples:

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...

Another analogy would be EU membership and trade deals, they curtail others members from doing any trade deal as well as charge a fee.

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.

Can you point to anything saying that the problem with monopolies is you’re not allowed to cancel a contract?

I’ve never heard that before as a definition and doubt it would stand up in a court.

I said "issues canceling" - Nothing about `not` being able to.

Google does control what equates to an effective monopoly of all smartphone software in the EU. You don't need to sell to have a monopoly that you can abuse.

Android is mostly open-source and nothing prevents manufacturers from forking it for their own purpose. Google play Services is not an obligation when you see things this way.

Manufacturers want the Google Play Store for the same reason Willie Sutton is said to have robbed banks: because that’s where the money (and the apps) are.

The effective monopoly is in access to the Play Store, which requires Play Services, which is strongly controlled by Google.

Google Play Services enable Google to guarantee a consistent UX across a wide range of OEM devices. Anyone with a Nexus device can build and flash an AOSP eng/debug image and manually install just the Play Store to understand why Play Services are a requirement.

How many computers did Microsoft sell in the 00s?

Microsoft forced OEMs to install Windows at the time. That's a slightly different situation. As far as I know Google is not force-feeding Android to anyone.

In what way did Microsoft force OEMs that Google doesn't?

Could you fork Windows at the time? No. You can fork Android anytime now. That's the difference.

You can fork AOSP, which I'm sure can't run any of the top 10 apps of the Play Store unless you install Google Services, which are closed source and require a licence from Google (which in turn requires you to bundle Chrome, make Google Search the default, etc).

AOSP by itself is pretty useless because it can't run any of the apps the public is interested in.

*Can't run many of the apps. Lots of apps will run with limited functality. Chrome generally runs on AOSP, but it won't update and isn't nearly as capable as it would be with Google Services installed.

You can't freely fork the Android that's dominating the market: Android with Google services in it, key components of it are proprietary. You can't even sell some devices with it and others with an AOSP fork.

No. They gave a better deal to OEMs who used Windows exclusively

How did they force them? With a gun or something?

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.

They forced them like this: If you're installing Windows on all your boxes, it costs you $X per box. If you install Windows on only some of your boxes, it costs 2X or 3X per box.

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".

That sounds like a volume discount, which is actually encouraged under most capitalist models to capture consumer surplus. Its not exactly what happened. To put it simply, Microsoft used a complicated pricing model where the OEM paid a lump-sum to Microsoft based on expected sales and Microsoft applied zero marginal pricing so every copy of windows was "free". But if they exceeded their sales they then incurred a fee for every additional unit sold. If they increased their sales, then the lump-sum would have to be renegotiated for the next contract. They wanted to tax the 'output' of the OEMs instead of just selling them at volume. It was a form of predatory pricing which got them into trouble. I don't believe competing OSes were ever a big threat to Microsoft.

Microsoft did not sell computers but was found to have abused their Windows OS monopoly.

Marketshare of their OS and associated services, not their phones.

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