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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how deeply integrated Google services are becoming in Android. With Android at something like an 80% marketshare, I wonder if and when they'll get hit with an anti trust action a la Microsoft in the early aughts. MS got in hot water for bundling IE with Windows, but here we have Google basically making the entire OS default to Google services for device-wide basics: voice recognition goes through Google by default, Google-branded search is the default on your home screen, etc. etc. (At least on Nexus devices and in OS images; I haven't used anything else.)

Curious as to how they're getting away with it. Maybe because it's open-source, so someone could replace the default if they worked hard enough? On the other hand, in the MS anti trust days it wasn't hard to choose a different default browser--and it was certainly easier than changing source code.

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I don't think it is baked into the OS. For exemple, Now on Tap in AOSP is just an 'Assist API' . Any app can implement this system callback in order to enrich an Assist call and any developer can create an alternative to Now on Tap that will get the exact same data from the device.

AFAIK, All the Google branded apps & Services are part of Play Services. Nothing prevents you doing what Amazon is doing and create a device from AOSP, don't include AOSP and replace it with your own services.

IANAL, but it seems that the focus is on the fact that Play Services comes with a full suite of apps.

There was an article recently suggesting that they're being investigated for exactly what you describe (by EU officials, I believe).

I don't mind Google's bundling as much because you can still use Android without it. Old versions of Windows and current versions of iOS are irritating because can't remove those default apps. They're just always there, and sometimes you can't even replace them with alternatives.

You can't use cell triangulation for location without submitting location requests to Google. Either that or GPS only.

Maybe; but on a Nexus at least, you can't delete a lot of the basic Google services. For example you can "disable" Google Wallet (or whatever it's called now), but you can't "delete it permanently". It'll always be in your settings page, waiting to be reactivated. It's the same deal with things like Google Music.

In the MS anti trust days, you couldn't delete IE either. But you could use Firefox instead, and just pretend like IE wasn't there. Android seems like that kind of situation to me--you can't delete the Google defaults, but in a deep, dark advanced menu you can disable them at best, after a scary warning. In other words, you can use alternatives to Google apps, but you have to pretend like the defaults aren't there--but they always are.

There's also something weird going on with disabling - it's probably just an obnoxious bug but I've had hangouts disabled for at least a year on my Nexus 5 and I get "unfortunately hangouts has crashed" at least daily.

I've had the same issue before, and IIRC it's a problem with Google Play Services, not Hangouts or disabling in general. Still stupid though.

Legal action clearly didn't work against MS. They're now bundling the same basics (integrated search, Cortana etc) in Windows 10

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