The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said on Tuesday Google’s contract terms with device makers amounted to an abuse of its dominant market position that restricted competition in the mobile OS market.
[…]Under the AFA, manufacturers could not equip their handsets with modified versions of Android, known as “Android forks”. That has helped Google cement its market dominance in the mobile OS market, the KFTC said.
Under the ruling, Google is banned from forcing device makers to sign AFA contracts, allowing manufacturers to adopt modified versions of Android OS on their devices.
Good. This particular kind of paper restrictions need to die in a fire.
Echk, device fragmentation to intensify. Buy one at your own peril. This is a huge gift to Apple.
Apple is a minor player (<20% market share) in most countries. Price prevents it becoming mainstream.
I can only speak for the US market and apps that devs want to build here for this audience. If this takes root, it will increase the cost for android development and cause more devs to treat Android as their secondary choice for launching. Right now its their first choice in many cases, with Apple coming second. For companies that actually provide support for their apps, this would be really bad news. Its already a factor to some extent, where some odd Samsung devices behave strangely with our app under some circumstances. Lg had odd quirks. Etc.
And with the swipe of a pen, people have to buy a Google device to get real Android. That’s what people have been saying for a while anyway. We’ll probably get some good and some bad out of this.
I would be more stoked if the bill mandated phones with upstreamed FOSS drivers and people could install alt OSes as easily as x86.
Flatland_Spider,
Woa there cowboy, what do you think this is, the Renaissance? People aren’t ready for that yet, haha.
I’ve been wanting that for decades now…it’s hard to say if it could actually happen. Manufacturers haven’t really budged at all. The linux community keeps blaming manufacturers, who do deserve blame, but have refused to implement changes to improve the driver situation for users. The industry and FOSS community have both demonstrated the willingness and capability to do nothing and keep us in this deadlock indefinitely. It doesn’t look like we’re taking an offramp any time soon.
I see two wildcards in play, which could potentially disrupt the market:
1) Fushia. I don’t want to make assumptions about Fushia’s success or even if google’s heart’s in the right place. Regardless I think it has the potential to detour our deadlock by providing a new path around those who are responsible for the eternal deadlock.
2) Lawsuits/legilsation. I don’t have much faith in this. Historically government policies are too little and too late. But supposing they did take it seriously and assuming lobbyists don’t block it, it could create change and corporations would be forced to oblige. But again, our governments typically side these corporations, so it seems unlikely.
2021 where there is no good reason device drivers shouldn’t be under a BSD or MIT license so I can repurpose hardware as I see fit! 😀
I’m kind of figuring this will get litigated, and it will get watered down. (US perspective, SK might be different.)
Black box reverse engineering is hard, and it’s better to start with something like the Pinephone hardware which has provisions for OS debugging.
I’d like to run OpenBSD on my WRT1900ac, but that’s probably not going to happen because OpenWRT was a factory effort by Linksys/Belkin devs with access to dev boards. The WRT series not having provisions for OS hacking is an oversight, now that I think about it.
Anyway….
I have no idea how Fuschia is going to turn out. I’d like it to be an interesting microkernel OS base, but we’ll see.
The Right to Repair movement is probably the best hope. It’s gaining support. John Deere locked down their tractors and got the rich, corporate farmers angry at them, and people are mad about the complexity of cars and having to take their car to a dealership for repairs. 😀
Nonsense. That’s what trademarks are for. All Google has to do is enforce their “Android” trademark to differentiate approved Android from “forks”.
Google wants to have an open-source AOSP without any forks reaching the mainstream market. It doesn’t work that way.
@kurkosdr
Yes this is exactly how the OpenGL ARB orgaised things. You had a conformant implementation of OpenGL or you weren’t allowed to call it OpenGL. Initially conformancy tests cost (serious) money but later I believe the conformancy test suite was made free.
Nobody advertises Android on their phones anymore. Its the Samsung S 21 or the Moto G Plus 6 or the Sony Xperia 1 Plus or whatever.
But I guess the real issue is will the forks be able to show up with the Google play store? If so then this terrible for Google, if not they I guess its not likely that big of an issue in the US.
All Google-approved (aka Play Store-equipped) devices have to show a “Powered by Android” logo at boot. So, all devices running a Google-approved fork have to display the Android trademark at boot, either the manufacturer wants it or not.
The Play Store is proprietary software, so the rules for its distribution are whatever Google says they are. So no, the Play Store isn’t affected. The issue here is Google using back-room contracts to restrict manufacturers from making devices not distributing the Play Store (or other proprietary GMS software) in any way, essentially preventing unapproved AOSP forks from manufacturers also making devices with approved forks. Case in point:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/report-google-threatened-acer-forced-it-to-dump-rival-os/
This is what this new ruling seeks to prevent.
“All Google-approved (aka Play Store-equipped) devices have to show a “Powered by Android” logo at boot. So, all devices running a Google-approved fork have to display the Android trademark at boot, either the manufacturer wants it or not.”
No one cares what the boot screen says. My mother in law isn’t going to complain to T-mobile if Android doesn’t show up on the screen. That was my point, that people don’t care about the name android, but if it shows up without google play store, gmail, youtube, … thats when they would complain.
T-mobile is smart enough to not sell your grandma a phone without Play Store, and Samsung is smart enough to not make a phone without Play Store and still call it a Galaxy.
This is all about Google keeping the major manufacturers locked into the Play Store, even if a Play Store-less fork would be a viable alternative in some markets (see linked article above). Samsung should have the right to make its own Play Store-less AOSP fork, as per the terms of the open-source license.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I agree with your point. Once people have a phone in hand, they don’t care about branding. However I do think people go out and buy android phones because they’re “android” phones. You would need a potentially expensive campaign to educate people that this-non-android-phone works just like an android phone.
I don’t know if they’d be allowed to get away with “android compatible” on the marketing/packaging material? What does trademark law say about this kind of unauthorized usage?
Seems like a great deal for Google. They got a decade w/o any competition on Android and it only cost them 200M.
It’s probably not going to hurt Google in the long run. Non-Google Android phones have perennially been their own worst enemy, and the Google Approved(TM) brand will become sought after.
Not that anyone cares because we accept computers are leaky bags of crap.
And when will Apple be required to stop abusing its market position and allow device makers to use its software any way they please?
Maybe that’s a step toward the right direction : https://www.osnews.com/story/133941/major-win-for-epic-games-apple-has-90-days-to-open-up-app-store-payments/
You mean Facebook? Are still mad about Apple limiting their surveillance of you?
PROTIP: Apple hasn’t released iOS (or a functional subset of iOS – something like what AOSP is for Android) as open-source.
Without an open-source license, rules for distributing the software and its source-code are whatever Apple says they are.
South Korea passes a ruling that allows Samsung to use a Fork of Android, who would’ve thunk it!
I always assumed that Samsung is the real government of South Korea .
Erez,
Yeah, the close relationship may have had something to do with it. But at the same time manufacturers should be allowed to use forks, so it’s not really an egregious overstep.
Indeed. The OEMs should also see how much money Google is willing to shell out to keep them in their camp. Google is running really low on handset manufacturing partners, and now the remaining few can double-dip! Especially the non-Chinese partners. 🙂
This is the correct take. XD
Why shouldn’t Samsung be allowed to use a fork of AOSP? AOSP is open source last time I checked. Samsung should have the right to make a Samsung-branded Amazon phone if they want. If Google didn’t want that, they shouldn’t have released AOSP as open-source. This is Google pretending to release AOSP as open-source while using secret back-room contracts to restrict the rights given by the open-source license.
Keep in mind that Google can and does in fact enforce their “Android” trademark to differentiate approved Android forks from unapproved ones.
How exactly is this a good thing? Google forcing some kind of order in Android space was my great hope for a flatter development playing field. As it is now, what runs on one Device, can fail horribly on another because manufacturer A thinks it knows better than manufacturer B. It is a total mess, and anyone who tells you lack of standardization is a good thing for Android is NOT a developer and REALLY does not care about usability.
ANDANDAND!!! Samsung is one of the WORST offenders. Literal garbage Android pimped with useless features and failing to work consistently.
You should really look into what the AFA is and understand what it actually does. This really has zero to do with how Samsung or any other manufacturer tweaks Android… The AFA doesn’t really stop this cause if it did it wouldn’t be a problem would it?
What this is about are things like One UI and FireOS and whatnot, things that are NOT called Android but are based/build using Android source code. That is what Google defines as an Android “Fork”, not tweaks that Samsung makes to its Galaxy Phone that are delivered in user space or drivers or whatnot.
What the AFA does is make it impossible for someone who wants to sell licensed Android devices to ALSO sell devices containing Android “forks” like Fire OS (or really anything based on Open Source Android code).
Here is a good example that clearly demonstrates why Google’s AFA contracts are really really bad. Smart TVs. If you were say Sony or LG or whoever, and you want to make sure your TVs reach the widest audience possible, you could EASILY sell your TV so that it supported both Amazon Fire TV (Fire OS) and Android TV, and even throw in WebOS if LG wanted to license it. But you can’t because of the AFA. Google basically forces you to make a choice, and that choice affects your products across ALL product lines (phones, watches, tablets, everything). So if you want to sell a TV with Android TV, you basically cannot license Fire OS from Amazon because it would breach your contract, even though the hardware for both is basically identical.
I dont like what Samsung does to their Android phone either, but this has nothing to do with that… This is actually one of those ultra rare things called the courts getting it right for fucking once… Just wish it could be a US court occasionally
Samsung can dictate terms and extort money from Google. Samsung is Android for most people.
Restrictions like this are often a good thing…
Carriers and handset manufacturers want to apply their own branding and shovelware. You might buy a phone which is ostensibly android (or before that, symbian etc) but the carrier has hacked it up to such an extent that it’s now completely broken, plus you have to wait for whoever customised it to apply their hacks to any updates that come out and you might not even have the ability to wipe the device and put a stock firmware on it.
On the other hand, even if you buy an iphone from a carrier it will not be loaded up with crap nor be running a broken customised firmware. You know what you’re getting, you can update it as soon as apple release the updates, you can wipe it and restore it to the stock apple state any time you wish, and you know it’s going to keep receiving updates for several years – eg ios 15 goes back to the iphone 6s which was released in 2015.
Perhaps an open standard for phones, like the IBM compatible did for x86 machines. Publish specs, produce Android and other systems to be installed on phones meeting the standard. Have a standard phone, it can run any OS compatible with the standard.