After news earlier this week that Google was going to make sweeping changes to how it licenses Android within the European Union, The Verge now has the prices Google is going to charge.
EU countries are divided into three tiers, with the highest fees coming in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands. In those countries, a device with a pixel density higher than 500 ppi would have to pay a $40 fee to license Google’s suite of apps, according to pricing documents. 400 to 500ppi devices would pay a $20 fee, while devices under 400 ppi would pay only $10. In some countries, for lower-end phones, the fee can be as little as $2.50 per device.
That’s quite a bit more than I would’ve thought.
It is only $40 if the vendor chooses to not ship Chrome/Search with the app bundle. Ship Chrome/search and the license is still free.
Google has never prevented an OEM from shipping two browsers. So an OEM could ship Chrome and Edge both today (every Samsung phone ships with two browsers right now). They were simply prevented from making the non-Google browser the default.
Now you can ship with MS Edge as default and leave off Chrome. But if you want Gmail, Play store, maps, etc you have to pay the $40.
Hi,
The sad fact is that most people (see note) just use the default and couldn’t be bothered changing (or figuring out what to change to); and after a while whatever they’ve been using becomes familiar and everything else becomes unfamiliar and unwanted (even if it is better). That’s why (e.g.) Microsoft tried so hard to ensure IE was the default on Windows years ago.
Note: People who read sites like OSNews aren’t a good indicator of “most people” (they’re typically more knowledgeable and more likely to change defaults than the average person).
– Brendan
Really? For some people nothing’s good enough. Free? Nah-nah, too many string attached. Not free? Nah-nah, you’re exploiting us, and killing the neighbor’s dog. Not free but possibility of free? Nah-nah, you’re unfair and forcing our hand.
Seriously. Just decide, then go with it. Personally, I’d have quite enough of this crap. On one hand, with politicians, you can never be sure whether they act because they actually think they’re right or if they’re on some special interest mob/lobby koolaid regimen. On the other hand, people, oh man, don’t even get me started on people
IMHO, I’ll always use the best available. I’m not saying what I think that is, cause I’d see no end of it.
Hi,
Yes, really. What they’re doing is a minor variation of “tying” (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) ). It’s unethical (if not illegal).
“Free” (regardless of whether you provide Chrome & search or not) would be fine. “Paid” (regardless of whether you you provide Chrome & search or not) would also be fine. “Free unless you don’t let us use anti-competitive practices for browsers and search” is not.
Note that Google’s “plan” is in response to EU already saying that tying Chrome and search to other stuff is illegal.
– Brendan
Actually, no. Anti-competitive was what Google did so far (“take it or leave it”).
Now, thanks to the regulatory intervention, the device maker can decide themselves whom they are going to charge the $10-$40 to let them install their services on the device.
Suddenly there is a market for search/cloud service providers on Android! And another great part of this is the transparency: Now we know how much they (expect to) earn from having their software pre-installed on our phones.
Think about it: This is the very same as Firefox earning billions of dollars for their default search engine setting. It’s not pretty, but it is a reality. One that was so far obscured and non-competitive on the Android platform.
Seems it might be the other way around, the device makers will be charged. Would be more transparent if Google (or other providers of services) were paying manufacturers (which in turn could pass it on into lower price for smartphone buyers)
The EU commission imposed fines to punish google for abusing it’s position to promote google’s own services.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4581_en.htm
Breaking up this control could help encourage competition in more ways than one. Predatory pricing made it all but impossible for small platforms to compete in the mobile OS space. They have no way to complete with google’s “free” subsidized platform, but perhaps they could compete with $40.
Severe damage to competition has already been done, just two major players share 99% of the smart phone OS market. By any standards this is pathetic. We’re likely looking at a couple decades for competition to return in earnest, and that’s assuming regulation succeeds in keeping the market fair, which is anything but certain. Still, it’s a minor win for those who think corporations have become far too big and anti-competitive.
Edited 2018-10-19 21:18 UTC
Microsoft… effing Microsoft couldn’t compete with Android. Neither could Nokia with Symbian or Blackberry. What hope did any “small platform” have?
At the end of the day, any platform trying to compete with Google in mobile has to not only give people a decent general purpose mobile OS, they have to also replicate all those services that Google provide. So that immediately limited options to AOSP, because Google could just decline to build apps for competing platforms. Face it, Google has built a huge moat around Android. You would have to spend billions to get anywhere close.
mkone,
One small nit-pick with this assertion. Just because it takes them “billions” to build service-X doesn’t mean smaller companies couldn’t do it for much less. Huge companies like google have tons of “fat”. Small companies can often get things done much cheaper out of necessity because they don’t have the benefit of a large purse.
Edited 2018-10-20 04:01 UTC
I’ve got another theory about Windows Phone’s failure; they simply decided to give up.
They had a market share of about 4-5% in the US, double that in the UK, and had market share in excess of 15% in some European countries when MS decided to cut their losses. If they scaled back their ambitions a bit, and marketed correctly when their competitors screwed up (Apple’s Bendgate, Samsung’s Note 7 (?) fiasco), they could have put themselves in a position to gain market share. Especially with the Samsung incident, they should have been able to blanket the world with switch ads…
Even their last major WP announcement, the 950 series, was pretty good. It’s major shortcoming, the plastic back, should have been marketed as a feature, and MS should have commissioned all sorts of designs to customize the product (I would have sold it backless), and to feature the user replaceable battery and guaranty a 7 year life for updates.
Lastly, they needed to stop messing around with the OS, and make incremental changes rather than wholesale ones.
The effect of Nadella’s decision has haunted MS’s efforts to retain and expand their developer network, and could hasten the end of Windows as a dominant platform as, more than 3 years later, they still have no cohesive plan to combat the move to phones as the sole or dominant form of computer usage for most individuals.
Totally agree! Nokia hardware was awesome. The flat tiles were innovative. And the promise of a seamless singular OS across all tiers of device (Desktop to Watch) would have been very compelling around now!
I still don’t understand what happened to “Windows 10 Mobile”. Microsoft seemed to be on the up-track, took over Nokia and announced they would release “low-mid-high-end” models every year and …. within a year everything was written off, put into maintenance mode and we never got any new hardware or interesting features anymore. I was one of the lucky ones with a 1520 that was great when I bought it and awesome until it finally died. It just seems that Microsoft taking over Nokia completely failed and the only reason I can think of is “Nokia/Microsoft were actually losing money on hardware they sold”
They can’t. Larger companies have tried and failed. You can’t map the entire world in the cheap. You can’t build out an entire payment system (a la Apple Pay / Google Pay) on the cheap given the number of partners you would have to engage. And an upstart won’t have all of the apps that have been built on Android, and some of which are completely hooked in to Google / Android specific infrastructure that they would need to replicate. And third party developers, who are the real moat, are not going to spend substantial amounts porting their apps to every platform that appears. And so users are not going to follow.
Well one can always take Open Street Map…
mkone,
This goes back to my previous post about microsoft’s failing strategy. You cannot enter a market as an underdog and expect huge buy in with a walled garden strategy. Small companies know this, but it’s a lesson microsoft hadn’t learned because microsoft’s leadership was so accustomed to having monopoly tactics on it’s side. Microsoft could have done a lot more to attract developers who were frustrated by apple’s walled garden and 30% fees. I honestly think that an experienced small business CEO could have succeeded where microsoft failed, if one had been given the chance to run microsoft. Succeeding as an underdog requires completely different strategies because you aren’t able to strong-arm the market.
“Nokia’s damages were self inflicted” allright – quite a bit before CEO from MS. Symbian was subpar and took too long to somewhat modernise (IMHO it was a victim of its early success – optimised for phones from different times: non-touchscreen, low-RAM/CPU …I used it on such phones; E50 was decent; but not touchscreen models), Maemo/Meego …also took too long, with restarts along the way, and hostility (BTW, also directed at Android) from other factions within Nokia.
Nice job, EU. This is probably going to be an even bigger clusterf–k than Windows N.
Edited 2018-10-19 21:59 UTC
And this will accomplish just one thing: the Europeans will have to pay for Android smartphones more than all other people of the world.
Meanwhile Android will remain the one as it should be.
Nice played, EU!
Yeah EU, don’t try preventing US monopoly for “simplicity” sake.
That’s not the point. The point is that actions should have positive consequences for consumers of general competitiveness
It is not the EU that decided to create “clusterf–k [like] Windows N” to respond to EU’s constraints. The economic scheme shouldn’t have evolved in the first place if a bit more regulatory was in place.
Kochise,
Exactly! It’s much better to keep a market balanced than to allow it to become unbalanced and broken. Major intervention after the fact end up being far more onerous and less effective than minor regulations that should be continuously enforced. Unfortunately we have corrupt government bodies that genuinely don’t care about balance or consumers or competition and only do the bidding of the wealthy corporations.
How many devices have a 500ppi density? Almost none. Even 400ppi is basically flagship phones.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 6.0; Mobile; rv:61.0) Gecko/61.0 Firefox/61.0
You would be surprised! Basically all Full HD 5.5″ models have > 400 ppi and all Quad HD models as well. 200 Euro phones like the Moto Z are 534 dpi and a 100 Euro phone like the Idol 5 is 424 dpi!
A 40 or 20 Euro price-increase would be 20% on top of their retail prices for these phones.
>500 ppi
https://tweakers.net/categorie/215/smartphones/producten/#filter:q1b…
> 400 ppi
https://tweakers.net/categorie/215/smartphones/producten/#filter:q1b…
…from Kernel itself, asking compensation for browser extraction is about propaganda hegemonics.
As long as the Search And Results from alternate browsers doesn’t go through any OS filtering, seems Ok -to me- on freedom of information.
Any attempt of propaganda through the OS UI -as some has tryed and failed before- would be very sad and unfortunate.
Pricing seems fair at first sight, apparently on economic zoning and assets of the phone.
(Sorry about spelling, lacking help on it at this system).
$40 reflects confidence in the maturity of the platform.
Edited 2018-10-20 13:57 UTC
we all know that monocultures are bad.
Use firefox with the addon “uMatrix” then one sees how deep google has infested the internet.
Factually one cannot have a website that other people can find without Google, and that is highly disturbing.
Microsoft has ruined a lot in ICT, stability is gone, look at the Win 10 problems with every larger update.
Loads of Android devices never get an update, so the eco-system is not exactly an example of a stable platform.
Apples with it’s controlfreaks is no solution.
I do hope one day a linux distro makes it on Phones, and last longer then just 1 year, I would pay $40 just to get rid of Google.
Janvl,
Osnews doesn’t allow me to give you a +1, but this is what I think as well. The duopoly we have is extremely harmful. Not only have alternatives become non-viable and we’ve lost choices this way, but it’s also harmful because of the way huge companies change their own offerings when competition is low and they can take customers for granted.
It’s extremely hard to fix a capitalistic market where competition is on the verge of extinction. People still want to believe in laissez-faire, but those policies inevitably let the incumbents rule the world. Some people are ok with that, but the more severely imbalanced we allow capitalism to become, the further we get from meritocracy. What a shame if this is our future.
Money is all those EU socialists understand, if they fine you, charge them for what no one else has to pay for
Then get fined again, higher.
Do you remember when the US had antimonopoly laws that worked and corporations had to behave? Good ol’ times.
I bet the economic value to Alphabet of a Chrome captive (user) is way more than 40 bucks. TV content providers charge over $100 per year for an add free experience and most folks spend more time on their phone browsers.
The EU has inadvertently exposed the underlying model and there is no free lunch. But there is a choice now and that is good. Totally agree with Alfman that this may open the door for a $39 new OS.
Minor detail is that business 101 requires charging a mark-up on all inputs to avoid margin dilution. The cost to an end user for G free Android might be $60.
*Except* electronics are priced according to what people are willing to pay, not what they cost to make. If that wasn’t the case Apple wouldn’t be making so much money.
So only part of the price is likely to move on to customers, and then again, the cheapest model will probably just take Google free offer.
Good approach. US and Europe actually looking at their phones more than to their TV’s.