In response to the decision of the European Commission to levy a steep penalty on Google, CEO Sundar Pichai put out a blogpost saying that the EC had called for a feedback from the public in the form of a survey and the response they received had confirmed to them 89% people use devices run on the Android operating system.
He feels the Commission has also ignored the large body of entities associated with Android in different ways and how they are offered a wide choice by Google. Pichai says the phone makers and app developers around the are under no compulsion to choose only a particular technology. Their work collectively has helped the users of Android devices in using technologically superior products.
He has then listed the countries from where over 1300 different brands of smartphones of 24,000 different models are made and sold. These include The Netherlands, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden.
Google CEO has stated in his blog that these manufacturers of phones in a variety of models are able to work with the same technology and they are even allowed to make changes at their end or add their own UI over the main OS. The benefit derived from Android is that the apps developed can be loaded on to these devices since they can work seamlessly across all hardware platforms.
He drives the point home further by arguing that some 1.9 million app developers who are residents of countries within the European Union and their apps are able to be pre-loaded on Android phones because Google has enabled its open platform accessible to them and the technology behind is stable to permit them to work on it. The fact is the phone maker loads many apps which are not their own but from independent developers and the user has to veto to remove them if they don’t desire.
The Android ecosystem’s flexibility has also been explained by pointing out that some 94 billion app download have happened on Android phones which is a reflection of Android’s open-arm policy, far from the restrictive practice that the Commission appears to suggest Google follows. Sundar Pichai has pointed out how far technology has progresses in the past 20-25 years due to efforts made by companies like Google and the wide choice that has been enabled to the public at large.
Going further, Pichai has hit upon the point relevant to the decision made by the European Commission. He says they are offering Android to device manufacturers free of cost right since 2007 though the company is spending billions of dollars. They do ask the device makers to load a few of its proprietary apps on the devices (these include Search, Chrome, Play, Maps and Gmail), but the phone makers are under no compulsion to include them or they can include other competing apps also. That way Google can earn revenue only when people willingly use its apps.
Concluding his post, the Google CEO has repeated the official reaction by the company immediately after the decision came that such decisions will only drive Google towards making its products proprietary and not offer them free. Such a decision will end up being detrimental to the users of smartphones and the app developers in Europe and worldwide.