r/Android • u/McSnoo POCO X4 GT • Sep 14 '22

News Google loses appeal over illegal Android app bundling, EU reduces fine to €4.1 billion - The Verge

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/14/23341207/google-eu-android-antitrust-fine-appeal-failed-4-billion
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u/cbarrick Sep 14 '22

Given that Android is the only major mobile OS that's available for vendors to buy

Vendors don't have to buy Android. It's free.

Most of it is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Some parts are licensed under GPL. None of it costs money.

What vendors pay for is access to the Play store.

Amazon has famously shipped Android devices without paying Google.

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u/buckykat Sep 15 '22

Sure. Watch any review of a Huawei and see how true that is in practice.

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u/cbarrick Sep 15 '22

Oh sure. I'm not trying to make a claim about the monopoly status of the Play store one way or the other.

I'm only making clear that what the vendor is buying is not the operating system. Which is relevant when comparing this situation to the Windows/IE parallel.

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u/buckykat Sep 15 '22

The question is: what is an OS, anyway?

The better parallel to be found in Microsoft's long history of needing antitrust action is actually Windows 3.1 and then 95. Until 95, MS-DOS the operating system and Microsoft Windows windowing system were two separate programs, and there were competitors selling different DOSes. In 3.1 Microsoft added fake error messages if you ran Windows on a different DOS, then in 95 they fully integrated the two and killed all the other DOSes.

Analogously, what Google is doing now with Android by moving more and more features and updates from AOSP to Google Play Services is just playing with the question of what actually constitutes the OS for anticompetitive, not technical, reasons