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Comment by ar0 | Hacker News Reader

Well, the European Commission alleges that Android has an 80% market share in Europe:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm (fifth paragraph)

But for this case, they are using a definition that makes Android even more dominant: they allege that Google restricts device manufacturers' freedoms. And from a device manufacturer point of view, Android has a 90+% market share of "licensable smart mobile operating systems", with "licensable" being key: as a device manufacturer, you cannot use iOS, so that doesn't count if you buy into this line of argument:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-16-1484_en.htm

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404 for the links: https://web.archive.org/web/20180707134410/http://europa.eu/...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180717113254/http://europa.eu/...

That is fair enough - though is there really any competition in that space? Even if Google did nothing, I imagine most manufacturers would continue using Android as there isn't much choice. I don't actually know any mobile OS other than iOS and Android variants. Blackberry, Nokia (?) and Windows for mobile are all pretty much dead at this point.

It's also about giving the manufacturers more freedom in what "flavor" of Android they ship, e.g. currently Google forbids them from making both devices with Android with all the Google stuff and devices without it, or devices only using some of the package.

Seems kinda perverse. After all, you can't fork Windows, macOS, or iOS at all. Why should making Android more open than the competition lead to worse punishment?

It's not making Android more open that leads to the punishment here. Google made Android more open when they open-sourced AOSP; they made it more closed when they prohibited manufacturers from actually forking Android in a way Google doesn't like. The behavior that is punished is the use of their market power to negate the open-sourcing, not the open-sourcing itself.

They are free to fork Android though and use it however they want, as Amazon did. They just can't install the Google Play Store without including the other Google apps which Google claims are part of a unified experience.

Well, that's why they don't want to limit Android's market share, instead they want to open up Android licensing restrictions.

In particular, the EU alleges that if you want to install Google Play on your phones, you need to sign a license agreement which also forces you to: a) install Google Chrome; b) make Google Search the default search engine; and c) not sell phones with Android forks at the same time ("Anti-Fragmentation Agreement").

They want to force Google to allow manufacturers to more freely chose which apps to pre-install and also to be able to offer Android forks in parallel to "Google-finish" Android.

I'm not sure if this will really be good for consumers... I would argue that most smartphones have too much crapware on them, not too little. On the other hand, the Microsoft Internet Explorer unbundling case arguably helped fuel the success of Firefox in breaking the IE dominance, which I would argue was good for consumers.

Of course there is. Mobile OEMs are quite capable of making their own operating systems and not so many years ago they all did. Of course Apple does, and Samsung still does with Tizen, from what I know.

These alternatives mostly suck but "your competitors suck" is not grounds for an anti-trust violation. No phone vendor is forced to deal with Google, that's an absurd distortion of the facts. Even if they feel their own in-house engineering abilities are so weak they can't make a better platform than Android, they can still take the open source code and use it as a base, providing their own mapping and app store along the way ... just like Apple do.

There used to be a plethora of mobile platforms:

  * Symbian
  * Palm webOS
  * Mozilla (I think that was also called WebOS?)
  * Jola
  * Some blackberry thing based on QNX that "supported" Android apps
  * Tizan
  * Windows Phone
  * Ubuntu Phone

Plus a bunch of independent / hobby(?) ones that never really took off, eg the Inferno port

These days it feels like most people have given up trying to compete against Apple and Google.

Mozilla's effort was Firefox OS (or Boot To Gecko), now forked as KaiOS.

Ahh fair enough.

Interesting to note that a quick look on the Firefox OS Wikipedia article has highlighted a bunch of other mobile platforms I'd forgotten.

Because consumers and developers do not want to support more than two operating systems. Even Windows failed with Windows Mobile.

The up and comer is KaiOS, used on super low-end phones in India. Its a version of the Firefox OS.

I personally think the issue is more with the OEMs wanting to close their hardware than it is with developers and consumers (not that Im suggesting your point doesn't also play a part)

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