Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

Not "just" the Play Store.

Apps

>If a company does ever manage to fork AOSP, clone the Google apps, and create a viable competitor to Google's Android, it's going to have a hard time getting anyone to build a device for it. In an open market, it would be as easy as calling up an Android OEM and convincing them to switch, but Google is out to make life a little more difficult than that. Google's real power in mobile comes from control of the Google apps—mainly Gmail, Maps, Google Now, Hangouts, YouTube, and the Play Store. These are Android's killer apps, and the big (and small) manufacturers want these apps on their phones. Since these apps are not open source, they need to be licensed from Google. It is at this point that you start picturing a scene out of The Godfather, because these apps aren't going to come without some requirements attached.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

and services as well.

View on HN

> Gmail, Maps, Google Now, Hangouts, YouTube, and the Play Store

This isn't actually a very strong moat.

(Non Waze) alternatives to maps are becoming increasingly credible. Google Now and Hangouts are history. An alternate client to Gmail is easy, since it speaks imap, and the Android app isn't particularly amazing by itself. Youtube's possibly the toughest nut, but there are alternate clients to it, the web UI works very well in mobile browsers, and besides many would be satisfied with just having TikTok.

This is actually a very strong moat. Note that there is some precedent for this: Windows and Office. Those are just as strong and they've kept MS in business for the last 40 years modulo some non-competitive behavior and strong arming 'partners' in exactly the same way that Google does.

Take that power away and suddenly you can have some actual competition. That of course would take a number of legal systems (laws, judges, governments) to hold the line. I'm not very optimistic about that.

Speaking for myself, as a silo’d SWE, but I’m starting to get the impression that MS Office (especially *.docx) is irrelevant today (excepting *.xlsx), outside of K-12 homework, at least.

I wouldn’t say it’s competition that’s involved, but that the state of the entire industry is such that all of the functionality present in winword.exe is now the minimum-viable-product in any information-system.

Or rather: anything you can do in Word, is now achievable in HTML; and given that no-one has a real need to print Word documents on paper, so it’s an ephemeral product that exists as a transition from paper-to-digital, living on borrowed time.

In conclusion, I see myself downgrading my personal Office 365 subscription from Professional Plus to just Excel in my next renewal.

A perfect illustration of my point, thank you.

There are Chinese phones that don't have any of these. In China, smartphones are basically a mostly invisible and easily replaced hardware layer under the everything app, QQ (WeChat).

Outside China, however, that's a non-starter. Furthermore, many apps like online banking will refuse to work on phones that don't pass Google's Android Attestation, which is also part of the take-it-all-or-leave-it package.

If you want to see how hard this is, just check out the forums for GrapheneOS (a secure thus degoogled fork of Android for Pixel phones).

>This isn't actually a very strong moat.

That's true for the likes of you and me, but for the other 97% of the population, not so much. Most people just go for the default or are completely unaware of alternatives or don't trust alternatives

For now, sure. But imagine Samsung putting $10B into the branding effort.

> there are alternate clients to it

They are increasingly being killed off by Google in their march to outlaw adblockers in the Internet

But Google ultimately won't be able to entirely get around the basic problem of DRM:

How do you give people something (so they can watch it), without giving it to them (so they can copy it)?

The more they try to prevent people from accessing YouTube without seeing their ads, the closer they come to the line of "actually, don't let people see the content they're here to see".

You only mentioned services in the last sentence, but the services are actually one of the most important part.

ie. Google Play Services is the 'goto' way for ANY third party developer to implement push notification.

So Samsung wouldn't only need to create their own, whole alternative for it, but they would also need to try and convince EVERY major app developers to now implement the alterantive in their own apps.

That's what Huawei was forced to do, and to this day there are apps that don't work or have less features on Huawei phones then on "google's" ones.

> That's what Huawei was forced to do, and to this day there are apps that don't work or have less features on Huawei phones than on "google's" ones.

“Forced”? By whom and to what end?

By the US government by Trump's ban on American companies doing business with them.

So yes, at the time Huawei were forced to try and build their own independent versions and it didn't work very well at all.

So they can include new pipe, and had ad-free youtube as a killer app. Gmail can be replaced with literally any email client, and maps also has alternatives.

No idea what a Google Now or a Hangout is.

What does "manufacturer" mean in this context? I don't think Qualcom or Foxconn can give a rat's ass about whether you pack Gmail or not.

Doesn't this apply even more to Apple devices? I'm not complaining, rather trying to understand how this fits into the broader arguments.

Huawei did it. Samsung can too.

maybe it would make sense for the two of them to put it together, that would be a reason for devs to support it, not just huawei but samsung too? suddenly the investment looks worthwhile.

Samsung have had their own app store for a while, but they'd never collaborate with Huawei on it, in my opinion. Corporations tend to be control freaks. They'd usually rather own 100% of a thing of size X than 50% of a thing of size 5X.

In addition, there's the sanctions angle. Bet this'd put them more in the crosshairs of the US. Can easily see e.g. the US saying you either stop the collaboration with Huawei or we slap tariffs on your phones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com