What would you have expected them to do? Vendors are free by licensing to fork AOSP and do what they will with it. Ain't nothing Google can say to change that; any more than they can say what people can do with forks of Chromium.
- Google most certainly can restrict how its products are used, in fact they do. Licensing comes with rules.
- Huawei is “free” to use AOSP, but can’t use Google’s APIs. See how far they got with that. No App Store and no Google APIs means a lot of apps won’t work. So you really need Google’s version unless you’re in China.
I don't think that's the main reason why Huawei cannot make phones. Sure in International markets it's an issue. But Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and other phones sold in China also don't have Google Play and Play Services.
> unless you’re in China.
You sell in China, you don’t need Google’s approval. Outside it you most certainly do.
No Play Store; alternative app stores exist. This can work; consider Amazon's Android devices which only support Amazon as their store.
Huawei has only been blocked from dealing with the US, but as a result it’s been killed around the world after being one of the leading low-cost brands. Why? No Google.
Take out the Play Store and Play APIs and now you’re just a random Chinese Android manufacturer.
> The "Android" name, the Android logo, the "Google Play" brand, and other Google trademarks, are property of Google LLC and not part of the assets available through the Android Open Source Project.
But guess what? This didn't (and still doesn't) influence the device vendors one bit. Instead, the device vendors worked around this constraint in the most blunt way possible: by stripping the word "Android" out of the OS in every place it appears, replacing it with some other term. That's half of what these Android-forked OSes (e.g. Xiaomi's MIUI) are about in the first place — giving the OS its own branding distinct from "Android."
The first truly successful Android devices were the Motorola Droid and the original Samsung Galaxy. Even back then, in the Android 2.X days, they were making modifications to the style of Android, similar to the way Samsung and HTC and others had similarly customized Windows Mobile in the pre-iPhone smartphone era.
Android managed to get a stronghold thanks to Google’s aggressive investment and the fact that they didn’t charge OEMs a royalty to use it (which Microsoft did and Symbian did. Also, neither Symbian nor Windows Mobile were at all competitive to iOS and Android was after Google pivoted post-iPhone launch) and the fact that they let carriers and OEMs do whatever they wanted to the interface and add whatever bloatware they wanted.
It wasn’t until well past the success of the Galaxy line that Google started to try to rein in the diversions and UX forks. And Samsung, which has a UX that at this point many of its customers prefer, has received a light touch from a lot of these attempts because they are consistently one of the largest Android OEMs.
Android largely has a userbase because Google let the OEMs do whatever they wanted, similar to what Symbian and Windows Mobile had allowed before.
Wintel duopoly all over again. I wrote/maintain two Android apps. 20 years ago, I wrote/maintained some Windows desktop apps. It’s amazing to me how it’s all different, but yet feels so much the same.
The average selling price of an Android phone in the US is less than $300. The average Android buyer in the US is getting a less than optimal experience and don’t seem to care. They would buy any phone that could make phone calls, surf the web and watch YouTube and get on Facebook.
Basically this:
__________________
| GMS Preinstalled |
Current |---------+--------|
GMS Status | Yes | No |
_____________|_________|________|
| Installed | OK | OK |
|-------------|---------+--------|
| Disabled | OK | OK |
|-------------|---------+--------|
| Uninstalled | NOT OK | OK |
+-------------+---------+--------+Many of them will show "X requires Google Play Services" warnings and then... continue working fine anyway. It's always the same wording, so I assume it's just a thing that the app-side libraries do when it tries to talk to the service and it isn't there.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/google-will-stop-bundling-it...