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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Edit: looks like I'm wrong, see IceWreck's reply below.

Original comment: my understanding is that this means Google will deny their customers access to Google Play, Photos and other first party Google apps. Samsung has replacements for some of these but not all of them.

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Android's early commercialization actively encouraged OEMs to "customize" Android for at least two reasons: Android product maturity was questionable, and what else are phone OEM product managers going to do?

Now that "Google experience" is generally cleaner and better than OEMs' customizations, Google is struggling to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It is very damaging to Android as a product because OEMs are slow to issue updates and won't continue updates beyond three years, in most cases.

I doubt Google will strong-arm Samsung over this. They need Samsung more than Samsung needs the Play Store and other "Google experience" apps.

Pixels hardly get much more updates, despite Google.

That's one reason I like Pixels. The camera software is better than other phones, too. Unfucking a Samsung phone's default set of apps is annoying, though I admit I have not had to do that in a while.

Nope, to access play services you have to add the powered by android logo and preinstall a minimum set of required apps (including the google search app), but afaik nothing saying google has to be the default search engine.

Perhaps that will change in response to this.

Seems unlikely. Samsung would justifiably paint that as anti-competitive / monopolistic and the last thing Google wants is more scrutiny from various government regulators right now.

But that would be anti-competitive, right?

I agree. Probably. Microsoft got hit for this, although of course changing browser is almost as easy as changing search engine.

The question is: why isn't it anticompetitive to have Bing as the default?

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