So the big news this week, if you somehow missed it, is that the EU hit Google with a €4.34 billion fine over Android. That's something like $5 billion US, which is a number so big I can't actually picture it, so I've stopped trying. Margrethe Vestager (the EU's competition commissioner, and at this point basically a recurring character in every tech antitrust story) says Google broke the law by forcing phone makers to preinstall Chrome and Google Search if they wanted the Play Store, and by paying manufacturers to not ship forked versions of Android. Google's got 90 days to change how it does business in Europe or the fines keep coming.
I'm not going to pretend I have some grand take on the legal mechanics here, other people who actually understand EU competition law are writing that post today, probably several times over. What I keep thinking about instead is my own phone, and my own weirdly long history of fighting with it.
Back in (I want to say 2013, maybe 2012) I wrote a post here about rooting a Galaxy Nexus and installing a stripped-down ROM because I was annoyed that half the apps on the thing couldn't be removed. Google Talk (remember Google Talk?), some carrier bloat, a handful of Google apps I never opened. Rooting it felt like a genuinely subversive act at the time, like I was doing something to my own property that the manufacturer didn't want me doing. Which, I guess, I was.
Five years later I've got a phone that's better in every measurable way and I still can't get rid of Google Play Music even though I pay for Spotify. I still can't set a different default assistant without digging into settings menus that feel deliberately buried. None of that is illegal, to be clear — bundling your own apps into your own operating system isn't automatically anticompetitive, that's not what the ruling says. The ruling is specifically about Google using Android's dominance (something like 80% of smartphones worldwide, and climbing every year I check) to lock out competitors at the manufacturer level, not about whether I personally enjoy uninstalling things. But it's hard not to connect the two when you're the one holding the phone.
Here's my actual, unhedged opinion, since apparently I have one: I think this fine changes approximately nothing for me as a user in the next year. Google will do the paperwork thing where they "unbundle" search and Chrome from the Play Store license in the EU, manufacturers will still preinstall them anyway because that's what users expect and what makes phones sell, and the actual on-the-ground experience of buying a Samsung or a Huawei or whatever will look identical. The fine matters as a legal precedent and as a signal that regulators are done being polite about this stuff, not because it's going to change what's on your home screen next month. I'd bet actual money on that if I were the betting type, which I'm not, because I lost forty bucks on a March Madness bracket back in college and learned my lesson.
Anyway. If you want to do the thing I did in 2013 and actually strip your own phone down, it's a lot easier now than it was then — most OEM app packages can be disabled (not uninstalled, but disabled, which is close enough for most people) through Settings without rooting anything, right from Application Manager. Long-press, tap Disable, and Google Play Music vanishes from your app drawer without ever leaving your device. It's not satisfying in the same way tearing the whole ROM apart and flashing something custom was. But it works, it takes ninety seconds, and you don't void a warranty doing it.
I also want to note, completely unrelated, that Comic-Con is happening in San Diego again this week and my Twitter feed is fifty percent cosplay photos and fifty percent people complaining about Hall H lines. I've never been. I don't think I'd survive the lines either, honestly, I get impatient waiting for coffee.