A monopoly is whatever the party says it is
Comment on A Jury Will Decide If Google's App Store Is an Unjust Monopoly
nicholasio@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What am I missing? You can download other app stores like Aurora or F-Droid do what’s the monopoly?
ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
jimbolauski@lemmy.world 8 months ago
We have always been at war with Eastasia
nbafantest@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s the other stuff that you are forced to accept if you want access to google play store.
Its not really solely about the play store.
ExLisper@linux.community 8 months ago
A you being sarcastic?
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not at all, there are a lot of third party spots stores for Android and getting them working isn’t that difficult.
Apple allows nothing but their store, peroid.
Seems like we’re focused on the wrong app store here.
ExLisper@linux.community 8 months ago
Oh, ok, let me explain.
When Android was still young there were actually more app stores, for example one from Amazon. Since Google owns a lot of services and apps that people like to use on a phone (maps, email, browser, search) phone manufactures wanted to sell phones with official Android licensed by Google. So what Google did was to offer discount on Android license to manufacturers that would preinstall only Play store on their phones. Most manufactures went with it and soon all phones had only Play store preinstalled. Since no other store was popular app developers would only publish apps in Play store thus ensuring that no other store would gain popularity among normal users.
Today, when Android is the only competition for iOS Google only licenses Android to companies that don’t offer un-googled phones. So if company wants to sell Android phone with Google Maps, Gmail and google search they can’t also offer Lineage OS versions.
This is definition of monopoly. Google used money to kill off competing stores and now is using their dominant position to not let anyone else on the market.
mlg@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Google enforces the installation of the crappy side bar google feed if you want to ship your phone with Google Play and Gapps
It also includes some other wacky tacky tracking and data collection bs, and some magic legal licensing stupidity that basically lets google control your software packages with what must be installed as system apps.
Google spent the past decade basically ensuring no competitor app store succeeds. No OEM uses Aurora, and only FOSS people use F-Droid. Samsung Shop is also a joke.
Anytime OEMs even try to make an alternative function, Google hangs their Gapps policy over them and prevents them from ever releasing into the market. Most notably affected are most of the Chinese brands which also got slammed by US government bans. “China government surveillance” is not an excuse when gapps literally do the exact same thing.
I think the last phone I ever had that had its own unique android apps and tools was the LeEco Le 2/S3, which came out in 2016. Nowadays, you can’t even use allegedly superior RCS without google’s crappy Gapps messages app.