Google app suite costs as much as $40 per phone under new EU Android deal | Hacker News Reader

Google app suite costs as much as $40 per phone under new EU Android deal

theverge.com

30 pointsAissen25 comments

May be the OEMs can sell phones without Google apps for a lower price if they choose to increase the device price to include them. I'd buy one!

Google already locked down Android pretty badly. Many important apps require the Play Store and all that Google stuff to be installed or to be fully functional (e.g notifications). MicroG is not enough for my needs and they introduce new things like SafetyNet to make things even worse. To me that's WAY more important than Google being installed by default or not. They can't lose until you fix this.

I've always heard people happy with microg, people dissatisfied with the complicated procedure of installation, but never anyone that could that was unhappy.

What did it lack, for you?

Don't get me wrong, I think MicroG is a great project and could work for many people. I already have to maintain a lot of Linux related stuff and I really don't want to worry about my phone too. The apps or workflow changes completely when you get rid of Google. I need to be able to trust that making the switch will be permanent, these things add up quickly (time). Death by a thousand cuts.

But if my phone fails it can put my job or even my life in risk. I can't affort to play cat and mouse with Google or the edge cases from and between MicroG and custom ROMs. I took a quick look at their issue tracker and it looks like these things still happen occasionally. As expected because no code will be good enough to fight malice in a platform you don't own.

I'm using microg, and it works for many but not all apps. For instance my bank apps still demand Play Services be installed.

Impractical. You're a tech savvy individual. Regular folks will find it friction laden to install an app store via sideloading

The phone would still come with an app store; it just wouldn't be the Play Store. Amazon is probably calling all the phone vendors already. Carriers might also like to take back control of the store.

Amazon/other store is not a compelling sales pitch to the end user. I myself wouldn't recommend the average user anything outside Google play, as it's light years ahead in selection, security, UX ...

True, though couldn't the manufacturer ship a phone with F-Droid installed?

The infrastructure and user experience is too bad to do that.

I feel that fdroid ought to be split up into two different projects. Their client and all the user facing stuff is terrible. What they are good at is compiling good apks. That should be their primary focus. ie., Building high quality apks that are free and reproducible. Someone else should do the client

When did you last try it? It's improved a lot recently. E.g. upgrading a lot of apps now requires only a single tap; you don't have to download/install/confirm install each one manually.

I use it regularly. It's a bit better, but I really would like to bypass the client altogether if possible. I don't want to sound too critical/ungrateful for something that is free in all senses of the word, but it does leave a lot to be desired. Main gripes: Their repo is either down or slow quite often. The client will just keep spinning until force closed. The new UI is worse (when is it not ? I can't remember a recent project whose new UI is better) Too many steps to do basic stuff. Entire blank page devoted to nearby (p2p) stuff, which I have no use for. Inconsistent links for issues, changelog etc., that can lead anywhere (either the upstream project, f-droid's version of the project, or some random website). Lot of other issues too that will get too long to get into here.

Phone manufacturer support may change that.

Why is this fee still with strings attached ? If they are going to charge for play services, just deliver play services for the fee. They want OEMs to bundle playstore, youtube, maps etc., still pay the 40 bucks, and end-user anyway has to pay with ads and personal data. So how is this helping anyone ?

It's helping other search engines which was the point. You might see phones with Bing instead of Google.

While people say that OEMs now have to pay up. The reality is that Bing will be paying.

The real trick is that Android has all the assistant features, which means that Android will be shipped crippled without them.

That seems to be a minor side-effect at best. This is generally more predatory, and closer to the windows 10 model i.e., a paid operating system that is user-hostile, and users generally don't have a way to opt out of the cost since OEMs won't really sell a machine without an OS or with linux. The $40 is still going to be passed on to the end-user here while nothing really changes.

I wonder will do Samsung and OEMs with Samsung RGBG Pentile displays? Previously they were artificially increasing their PPI for marketing purposes (compared to the "true" RGB display PPI) and now they will either continue to do so and pay more or declare lower correct PPI and pay less? Pride or wallet, who will win? :)

Not sure why this got downvoted; I've been wondering for years whether people can even tell the difference of these >400 PPI screes.

This will hurt OEMs in the short-term, but it will also incentivize them to get together and adopt some alternative solution, thus escaping Google's rule.

Given average Android phone lifespan of 21 months, this leads to $2 per month charge for each Android user in EU. Not big deal for most users. However, interestingly all the fines and taxes on corporations are always passed on to customers. When will EU understand in their quest to tax and fine the shit out of tech companies?

Not sure the EU commission will like that. They're still incentivizing Google Chrome and Google Search on Android devices with these discounts

This is pretty much exactly what the EU asked for—Google to unbundle so that handset makers could pay for what they want and Google would pay them for what Google wants (Chrome and Search), rather than just offering one take it or leave it package.

Tablet licenses are capped at $20. I wish I had the option of a supported Google app suite on an Amazon tablet. I'd pay a lot more than $20.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com