It's not about whether most people care, it's about competitors taking Google at their word and putting in the effort to make a competing store, only to get materially harmed when Google makes these backroom deals.

Nobody's making a third party app store on iOS because apple says "we allow it" so nobody's harmed when apple requires exclusivity to exist on their App Store.

The list of companies that put in serious effort to make a competing store and would have been materially harmed by deals like this is very small. And many were the recipients of these deals.

If this ruling is about helping them, then that makes the outlook even worse for consumers.

Well I guess in a scenario where Google decides to stop working with other hardware vendors and just makes their own phones running their own software, their existing hardware partners will have three options: exit the phone business; continue using something forked/continued from the android core as it is "now"; or move their phones to a separate platform (ie webos, or... Samsung had one too, tizen?)

Unless every single existing android vendor stops making phones, the result is more actual competition.

They don't have to stop working with other vendors to stop being open.

That depends entirely on how you define "being open".

To me what is open about the android platform is that it's used (and even customised) by multiple vendors.

The openness that the lawsuit was about, in particular. Primarily the ability to add other stores.

If they stop promising to allow anything beyond the Play store, you can't sue them for breaking the promise.

But that's the point: Google don't have complete control the "Android" that ends up on other vendor's devices. So Even if Google says "we won't allow other stores on <Google brand> phones", that doesn't prevent Samsung/etc from enabling it in their own customised builds.

They can stop allowing customized builds, except from forks of the old open source code with no gmail, no google maps, no play services, no play store, no youtube.

Which is what I said above:

> continue using something forked/continued from the android core as it is "now"

It seems quite unlikely that vendors like Samsung would just give up on their customisations.

That's not google being open though, so I feel like this line of conversation got mixed up somewhere.

Anyway, yes Samsung could do that, but do you think they value their custom apps more than youtube access?

Let's assume Google will still allow UI customizations. So Samsung can keep 75% of their work either way, the choice is between the remaining 25% or access to the Google ecosystem.

> That's not google being open though

Part of what makes Android "open" is that it's available to other hardware vendors to use.

> do you think they value their custom apps more than youtube access?

I don't know - Google seem pretty happy to put a YouTube app on the iPhone, where they have zero control over the App Store, and the reason is obvious: for everything they start, and eventually abandon, eyeballs are Google's primary business metric. Do you really think they'd deliberately cut themselves off from ~25% of all mobile customers worldwide?

Restricting the play store is one thing, I doubt it's even a drop in the bucket for Google profits, and it obviously gives them some degree of control.

I don't see them playing so fast and loose with the ability to view YouTube. It's like suggesting they would block access to Google search for non-Google "android" devices. The whole reason Android exists is to drive more eyeballs to Google services.

Whether Android is open, as a separate thing from Google, has very little to do with whether Google gets sued though.

> Do you really think they'd deliberately cut themselves off from ~25% of all mobile customers worldwide?

When it's specifically about forking Android, and looking at how badly they've been pushing things behind closed doors, I think they'd play pretty hard ball.