India’s competition regular has been investigating Google for a while
India’s competition regulator has been investigating Google for a while now. It has been investigating whether Google has a dominant position in five sectors. Those sectors are: licensable OS for smartphones, app store, web search services, non-OS specific mobile web browsers, and online video hosting. It has been concluded that Google does hold a dominant position in all those areas. The major pain point for India seems to be Google’s practice of requiring certain apps to be pre-installed on Android phones. The same goes for some other requirements the company has for Android partners. India’s competition regulator says that Google’s requirement to OEMs to install Google’s entire suite of apps and mandating those apps to show on the home screen will not fly. It says that it “amounts to imposition of unfair condition on the device manufacturers”. The regular also said that Google’s conditions have “reduced the ability and incentive of device manufacturers to develop and sell devices operating on alternative versions of Android”. India will basically prevent Google from restraining OEMs in choosing which Google apps will be pre-installed on devices. It is also said that licensing of the Play Store must not be linked with pre-installing apps from Google. That goes for apps such as Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, and so on.
India wants to force Google to allow third-party app stores in the Play Store
In addition, the regular demands that Google “not deny access” to Play Services to forked versions of Android. The last part has to do with the Play Store, as India also wants Google to allow third-party app stores in the Play Store. India basically does not want sideloading to be restricted in “any manner”. These are quite notable demands from India’s competition regulator. They would certainly create a precedent for Google. Some of them are more intense than others, and quite frankly, Google will certainly object to this. As of writing this article, Google did not respond to this ruling. We’re expecting a response really soon. There’s a lot to talk about, as the company will probably object to most of these points, if not all of them. We have a feeling it will have the most problem with third-party app stores, and sideloading, as there’s the security aspect to consider here, amongst other things.
