The action of the EU on Android could help rivals application developers



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Google's latest difficulties in the European Union could mean opportunities for application developers, blocked by contracts that preinstall the US giant's services on Android phones and tablets, according to analysts and companies. an antitrust fine on Android in the coming days that could exceed the record penalty of 2.4 billion euros last year for closing its rivals to its shopping search service.

But an accompanying command could free phone manufacturers applications to install on Android phones. This would give a crucial advantage to application developers, since about 80% of smart mobile devices use Android.

"That would help us a lot," said Gabriel Weinberg, Paoli's Pennsylvania-based CEO, DuckDuckGo, an engine search that does not follow users. . "It's clear to me that people would choose other options if the choice was easier to make." DuckDuckGo said he did not complain to the EU about Google, highlighting the effort involved.

Google dominates mobile search in Europe, with 97% of the market, while its Chrome web browser has a 64% market share on mobile, according to the StatCounter web traffic analysis firm. The company's control over millions of Android phones will help it to capture one-third of all global mobile advertising in 2018, generating sales of around 40 billion US dollars outside the United States. United, according to the eMarketer study

. For this, smartphone manufacturers who want to install Google Play Store must add a set of Google services, including search, web browser, email and mapping. EU officials are worried that users are sticking to the default value of their phone.

Email is "probably the most vulnerable for Google" if device makers could install their own default em-garlic application or add Microsoft Outlook, said Daniel Gleeson, senior analyst at the research firm Ovum. There is "certainly potential in the cards" where any loss of advertising revenue for Google from location services would be very serious, he said, citing Here Technologies as a potential competitor. [19659099] "Really huge difference"

European Commission declined to comment on this article. Microsoft declined to comment on possible opportunities for its services. Here, Technologies did not respond to a request for comment

OsmAnd, an offline mapping application, reported "a huge difference" when it was preinstalled on a small tablet in 2013, said the CEO. Victor Shcherb. Shcherb explains that his company competes only indirectly with Google Maps because its application tends to be directed to users seeking specialized mapping services, such as hiking. . The EU decision could help the application to reach a wider audience, he said.

Google has sold a share of the Russian search engine Yandex after agreeing to allow users to choose their own favorite search engine. Yandex says that he now has nearly 48% of the search market, compared with around 37%. Google has also paid a fine as part of the settlement of an antitrust investigation by the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia last year.

Pushing Internet Users to Choose Their Own Internet Browser More than a decade of antitrust litigation with Microsoft in 2009, pushing some web users to new brilliant Web software manufactured by Google – at that time, a newcomer to the market.

Android is "a multi-lane highway". of choice "and people can download competing apps at any time," said company legal counsel, Kent Walker, in a 2016 blog post. Google's apps account for less than a third of preloaded applications on a device, he explains, and "a consumer can scan any of its applications at any time."

Google also argues that its actions to monitor the Android ecosystem and prevent multiple versions of Android – also part of the probe from the EU – help application developers to do products that run on millions of devices. Giving free Android also reduces the costs of smartphones, he says. Google relies instead on advertising to make money from Android.

People are downloading a lot of other apps, according to a survey by the Developers Alliance, an association 70,000 developers, which counts Google as a member.

Among 2,000 Android users polled in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, about 28% are downloading additional search applications, 29% are downloading at least one new App Store and 23% are downloading at least one alternative web browser for applications that are preinstalled, according to the alliance.

Critics say it's hard to challenge Google. Aptoide, a competing app store from Google Play, filed an antitrust complaint with the EU in 2014 about contracts that prevent device makers from interacting with it.

Aptoide CEO, Paulo Trezentos, said: "handset manufacturing side." It depends more and more on the users who download the store via the web browser.The application store is rarely preinstalled , in part because it can not counter Google's offer to associate its app store with other Google apps.

Some analysts see little hope of "This order will arrive much too late because the users' dependence has been shifted from the Play Store to Google's services," said Richard Windsor, owner of the Google Play. Free Mobile Radio Research Company It's going to be "difficult" for anyone to come up with a better product line than Google – Reported by Natalia Drozdiak and Aoife White, w with Mark Bergen's help and Ilya Khrennikov, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP

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