Google To Now Charge Companies to Use Its Services in Europe
Why do we love Android? Isn’t it because it is open, simple, and native Google apps? For most of us, yes. These are the reasons why Android has grown to be the most used mobile operating system in the world. But that is soon going to change for European users.
Google has now decided to charge a licensing fee for the Play Store and other Google apps as the company is changing the way it licenses its suite of Android apps in Europe. Why such a change? In July, the European Commission fined Google with $5 billion for antitrust violations. The commission ordered the company to stop illegally tying Chrome and its related apps to Android.
Google Services
Why does Google tie these apps with Android in the first place? Well, Google gets its revenue brought in through Chrome and search, and so Google never had to charge for the operating system. But when the company faced this fine, Google decided to cover up for it, or at least covering up the money lost by splitting its services.
So now, companies would have to pay for individual services like the Play Store and many others that essentially make up the core parts of Android, and ultimately the reason why the world uses Android. But Google is sticking to its word and keeping the operating system free and open-source. But if companies want Android’s core services on their devices, then they would need to pay up.
Smart, Yet Risky
But Google is also making things easy for companies. Instead of getting everything together as one big bundle, the company is splitting its services into smaller bundles separately. That gives companies the choice to choose what they want and include their own services or features if they want to.
The Play Store and many other Google apps like Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube will come together as one single bundle, while Chrome and Google Search will come as another one. The catch is, the Chrome bundle can be added for free once the Play Store and its services are bought. The company is not keeping that as a necessity.
Google clearly wants its operating system to keep going and be used in Europe, and the company is now been willing to go out of its way to keep things favorable for the commission, but also at the same time making it sure that the company also gets a good profit out of this.
But if smartphone companies opt to use Google apps but decide to avoid Google Search and Chrome, the company would be losing a huge deal of revenue, and browsers that are neck to neck with Chrome can take over and be the more popular browser, not just in a particular area, but a whole country. And that is bad news for Google.
