As most of you know, Google makes Android available for all manufacturers to use free of charge. However, you must get your device approved by Google to get licensing for Google apps and such. Which is why companies like Amazon and Nokia don’t have Google services, in fact they use their own services with their own forked version of Android. Back in May, a few customers filed a lawsuit against Google and the way they license Android. Because it’s unfair for the competition
The plaintiff lawyers in this lawsuit have stated that Google makes OEMs set Google as the default search engine as they know users won’t go in and change it themselves. They must be referring to those “average consumers”. Which puts competitors at an unfair advantage, like Microsoft for one. “Google badly wants default search engine status because it results in more paid search-related advertisements,” according to the lawsuit. It continued, “which are the source of most of its billions and billions of dollars in annual profits.”
It’s true, Google’s biggest source of income is from their ads. In fact it’s over 90% of their revenue right now. Which is why we have all these free services because Google just wants us to use their services so they can serve us ads. Now Google argued on Friday, that this lawsuit should be thrown out because Google doesn’t make it mandatory for OEMs to use Google Search with Android, only if it’s Google Mobile Services certified. You know with Google Play, Gmail, and all their other services. Which kinda makes sense since you have all these other Google services on there. But, as we’ve seen already, a manufacturer can load Google apps and competing apps. We’ve seen that with Verizon phones. Which have both the Amazon AppStore and the Google Play Store on there by default.
I’m not a lawyer or anything, but it seems like this case should and probably will get dismissed. It doesn’t really seem like it’s anti-trust at all. What do the rest of you think? Let us know in the comments below.