India fines Google $162M for anti-competitive practices on Android

The amount in rupees is 1337 crores. I wonder if the CCI was aware of its significance among geeks :-).

In other words, Ambani’s Reliance co will launch search next month.

here is my take.

currently there are all microsoft-y nudge user till they allow then say "user accepted"... case in point. i have a moto phone that has stock android. very nice. it has default sms as "messages". this app keeps nudging me to use "chat features" and other bs so the "dont use connected features" line is really small while accept is a big button. they dont want me to not accept so they keep pushing me.

same for "play protect". i have decided to not accept it so every often i install an app it asks me if i want to enable it.

same for "enable location". i keep my location off so when i have to use an app, i turn it on and i get a message "for better experience, tun on device location which uses google location service". so if i accept this, "google location accuracy" and "emergency location service" and even wifi scanning (sometimes) gets enabled so these are really scummy techniques.

i use F-droid as my default app store and aurora store to download apps not on f-droid. haven't signed in to play store because i don't have a google account.

these "keep nudging till the user accepts" should be banned as well. if the user does not want to allow location accuracy, don't auto enable it.

Aren't PayTM and PhonePe bigger?

other comment mentioning that "Ambani’s Reliance co will launch search next month." is not realistic. I mean even Bing is not able to capture significant market share of Google after all these years.

> Google forbidding Indian telcom companies and Chinese smartphone manufactures from installing adwarecrap has made the ultra-cheap smartphone experience somewhat tolerable for hundreds of millions of people.

however, this comment is also related to Ambani’s Jio (Subsidiary of Reliance) are planning to launch Android devices. And mind it, Jio is one of the largest telecom provider in India with the blessing of ruling party. Jio also have suits of all kind of applications like chat, payment, audio streaming like Spotify, and what not, etc. which is less of utility app and can be use as surveillance system for the government in the future.

India is heading towards government system like deadly mix of Russia in terms of democracy and China in terms of surveillance system (look at the recent telecom act amendment proposed by government in last month. Basically it can force any VoIP services such as WhatsApp to verify user identity.)

Current government was not approving WhatsApp license for UPI for years until after WhatsApp decided to invest in Jio [https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/24/india-approves-facebooks-5...] At that time few peoples were discussing that this investment is nothing but to bribe government and/or Jio to get UPI license. Now WhatsApp got that permission [https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/13/whatsapp-permitted-to-exte...]