Comment by lopis
5 days ago
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.
Even getting Amazon tablet that’s specifically designed for children comes with useless apps you just cannot get rid off, because they need to shove all their services into your mouth hoping you will accidentally swallow at least some of them. There used to be time when every company had a mission statement and some (sometimes silly) ambitions, today it’s all just money, nothing else, not even a pretending anymore.
None of those companies have the market power Google does.
This is really important. Unless it's straight up fraud or a safety issue, most market participants are totally allowed to ship garbage (who are we to judge?).
At some point when monopoly power tests start turning true then the bar is raised (as it should be).
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.