Comment by lukan
5 days ago
“Android provides more choice for everyone and supports thousands of businesses. This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC.
Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now.
So much happened since 2018 that this ruling feels ancient now. It was about Google making unfair deals with OEMs:
> In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers.
While this specific problem is much better today, specially since of the DMA, things also got so much worse. And even if a new anti-trust ruling would occur today, we could expect it to drag on almost a decade again...
If only this was applied evenly. Why is every Samsung/LG/literally every non-Pixel device full of uninstallable crapware?
You mean un-uninstallable crapware? This has at least a technical reason: Preloaded apps are part of the read-only system image and cannot be removed. "Disabling" should be equivalent, though.
It's not just preloaded apps, though. A few months ago I prepared a Lenovo tablet for an elderly friend, and if I had just tapped through the OOBE wizard (which presented pages upon pages of optional crapware) without reading, it would have installed 20-30 preselected "popular" apps, mostly games. I had to manually deselect every single one.
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None of those companies have the market power Google does.
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The EU's DMA mostly losing its fight against Apple is what's driven Google to make similar moves, which will eventually lead to the elimination of F-Droid and other truly third-party markets, and may even make open-source or even freeware as untenable on Android as it is on iOS.
Worldwide markets for communications are based on the notion that bandwidth and infrastructure is too limited and expensive to allow competition, so effectively every country has adopted a model of overseeing government-mandated monopolies or oligopolies with consumer-protection regulations to counter the lack of competition. The EU has shown that the more those protections try to crack down, the more they fail, and as long as competition is unfeasible or outright illegal, consumers will suffer.
There's a reason an iPhone costs significantly more than a much more capable iPad, and that iPads had USB-C ports well before iPhones. If we had a cell-phone system that was as open as the ISM bands that WiFi operates on, we would have much better hardware for much cheaper.
>This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open
I wonder if that could be considered contempt of courts.
It's perfectly fine to disagree with a court's decision, what's the crime here?
Because it's factually and flagrantly incorrect.
> Contempt of court is a legal offense that occurs when an individual or organization interferes with the administration of justice or willfully disrespects a court's authority, dignity, or orders.
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Also, very rich given their very active attempts at nailing the door shut on every version of Android except for Android + Google
Absolutely. If anyone disagree with learned opinion of their lordships, they must be charged with contempt of court and barred from speaking on court judgements in future.
Very related: https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html
> Sure. Which is why alternative stores like F-Droid are under threat now.
I would love to read the internal memos one day when Google decided to make their lifes hard.
When they saw everyone with a closed platform (apple, nintendo, sony, microsoft) not deal with any of this anti-competitive mess.
Exactly. Give an inch and they'll want a mile, or in this case mm and km.
Why I cannot send email from my self-hosted, no dns, servers to gmail? email addresses with IP literals are much stronger than SPF (email is dropped if the IP of the SMTP client does not match the IP literal in the envelope and in all appropriate 'from' headers).
I cannot browse youtube with a noscript/basic HTML browser (basic <video> HTML element).
It is not enough, much more is needed to make those companies behave.
You misunderstand the security apparatus required to prevent spam if you believe that IP matching is sufficient.
You are an hypocrit: spam from an email address with an IP literal?
> Why I cannot send email from my self-hosted, no dns, servers to gmail?
Because email is a cesspool ruined by spammers and Google is doing the only sensible thing they can to block the scams and pill ads from reaching their users inboxes.
You did truncate the context: you have to add email addresses with IP literals. This does change everything.
google is more than anything else (and this has been a few years) following its agenda at making email just a private garden of messaging with a few "chosen ones" of his friends (selection based on $$$). They are presuming de facto anybody who does not fit their technical agenda to be a spammer. This is the same with their "web" with their web engines from the 'whatwg cartel'.
An IP/domain becomes a source of spam until it does. And with their billions of $$$, I guess they have an army of guys to handle that properly: trying hard enough to notify the owner with data, etc. Yes, this is 99% of the work which has to be done at gmail.
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