After the #Microsoft frenzy last week and the #Apple disaster yesterday, on today's menu is the @EUCommission #DMA compliance workshop with #Alphabet #Google.
What should I do?
Okay thank you all, it looks like I'm gonna live toot at least the juicy stuff :)
Interestingly, the Commission introductory talk included a reference to how the fact that #Android is essentially #opensource software facilitates #DMA compliance. 😍
(Which does of course not mean there is no non-compliance in Alphabet products, there certainly is.)
Yay #Google goes full in, claiming the #DMA would make Europeans "second class citizens" on Android 😆
And they do the same thing #Apple did yesterday: counting the number of meetings with regulators and other stakeholders in n attempt of proving good will. Still think this rather raises the question how the heck Google can still be non-compliant after all that engagement. 🤷🏼♂️
Blah blah blah I'm gonna spare you the list of unsubstantiated bollocks claims by #Google lobbyists like "Europeans already pay more for flights because they can't use Google to find the cheapest." or "We had 3,000 engineers working 2 years full time to be compliant." and the like rather than explaining to us why we still cannot uninstall the Chrome browser.... 🙄
Hmmm, so #Google lobbyists claim "All apps on Android can be uninstalled" but from my testing on #Android 16 with all latest updates on a #Pixel this appears to be false.
Google's own #DMA compliance report from March 2025 says this is wrong:
"Android allows to uninstall apps by: (i) fully deleting apps that are downloaded or pre-installed in the user partition; and (ii) uninstalling apps in the system partition such that they are returned into an uninstalled state."
Can anyone with a regular and recent #stockROM #Android phone confirm if they were able to uninstall (not deactivate!) pre-installed apps like #Chrome, #Youtube, #GoogleMaps, #GoogleDrive, #GooglePhotos, or #Gmail ?
OK so now @beuc explicitly asks the question on the lack of uninstallation and I followed up here in the room to press #Google on how they keep on pretending disabling apps was the same as removing/uninstalling them and somehow enough for #DMA compliance.
Google's answer: Nothing in combination with lies: they say if an app is disabled, only "remnants of code" remain on the device (wrong) and that "if you remove an app from the Android system partition, the OS breaks" (also wrong). 😠
Excellent online question by @GrapheneOS calling out #Google for selling "payment integrity" as security feature while using it to achieve vendor lock-in.
Google answer: None. Again. @article19's attempt to follow up was denied for sake of time. 😠
@ilumium @GrapheneOS @article19 When I asked #Google a follow-up question using Google's own terminology, like #PlayIntegrity #GMS etc. their team of three competition lawyers brushed it aside saying they didn't understand the acronyms. They did not let me clarify. This is a classic example of the Google lawyers being conveniently #ignorant of the key details of things the Google Play team does that nicely props up their monopoly.
#DMA #DMAWorkshop #DigitalMarketsAct #GooglePlay #EC #policy
