What are they talking about, exactly? It's perfectly possible to "unbundle" Android and Google's services. Google goes furthest in unbundling possibilities for any popular operating system, since they give away the source code for the operating system to be freely modified and be bundled with other cloud services. Amazon, Microsoft+Nokia (Bing) and many Chinese smartphone vendors (Baidu mostly) have all shown that this is possible. People pretend that Android without Google Play Services is somehow worthless or necessarily incomplete, which I don't agree with in the slightest.<p>It seems to me that what they're talking about is actually that Google's cloud services package bundles default Google Search, and Google does not provide the user or vendors with enough flexibility here. Okay, I'll definitely grant them that. So they want to use Google's cloud infrastructure selectively for the Play Store, but not for other profitable and integrated cloud services? Sounds a bit like eating your cake and having it too. If you look at this way, it doesn't seem such a reasonable request, although I guess it would be better for the market if Google was forced to give in.
This complaint is a narrow one: It is focused on the requirement to make Google's apps the default apps. In that it is similar to the Microsoft case where Microsoft was forced to provide a selection of browsers on installation. So it isn't as ridiculous as some here have claimed, and it is possible Google and/or the OEMs selling in Russia will be forced to make some accommodation or exit the market.<p>This wasn't always a requirement if you remember that terrible Verizon phone with Bing as the default (and impossible to change) search engine.<p>The question is whether Yandex can make a case for Android as a monopoly, and whether the choice of making an AOSP-based Android variant with a Yandex ecosystem isn't enough relief from such a supposed monopoly.
Off topic, but I am curious. To any Russian readers, how does Yandex hold up to Google for Russian users? Does it provide an experience better than Google in some way? Do people use it simply because it is domestic? Is it similar to Baidu in that it is a means of controlling the flow of information?
Last year, Yandex had to fight against government attention to its news aggregating service (that has a significant share of user traffic and ranges sources automatically by quality instead of closeness to official propaganda). <i>Rumor has it (and I may be totally making things up)</i> that Google conveyed an idea or two to the originators of the those censorship law proposals that were supposed to make Yandex manually filter “extremism” from news pages. Because Google doesn't have Russian offices anymore, idiotic government initiatives harm it much less than they harm Yandex.
I'm surprised there haven't been more lawsuits like this. I expect we'll see more suits like this, plus some about bundling of Chrome, and even about making Google the default search engine in Chrome.
So they want to quietly hijack the setting, the way all the fucking windows crap does, to redirect the traffic, and when it fails they complained about unfairness?<p>How about writing your own OS and creating an ecosystem for hardware vendors and developers first?
Google didn't set out to be evil. They just discovered, like Microsoft, that monopoly levels of domination are like the One Ring.<p>Bill Gates is Frodo. Larry Page is Bilbo.