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The pirated app thing was brought up after the fact, and really has nothing to do with the original issue- that google is strong arming a company to prevent a competing OS from being released.

Besides, claiming that Alibabi supports piracy because there are pirated apps in their store is the same as saying Google supports malware because their stores have sold infected apps.

That's not what I got. My understanding of the situation was that Google is saying Alibaba can't claim to be Android compatible if they are not. Alibaba is saying they are claiming no such thing, but their marketplace seems to not reflect that claim.

They aren't trying to prevent a competing OS at all.

But since Alibaba themselves put the pirated google apps on their store, I'd say that's quite a different situation than Google Play having malware.

sure, it can be forked. Not even Google is disputing that. They're just saying that, if you want to fork it, you don't get to be in Google's "handset alliance" anymore.

The Google Play store has plenty of pirated apps on it all the time, which you often have to DMCA Google for any chance of getting taken down. I don't think that's a big difference here.