After $5 billion EU antitrust fine, Google will start charging for Android apps

(credit: Aurich Lawson)
Google is adjusting to life in the EU after the $5.05 billion (€4.34 billion) antitrust fine levied against it by the European Commission earlier this year. Google is still appealing the initial ruling, which found that Google used Android to illegally dominate the search market, but for now Google will comply with the ruling and offer looser licensing agreements to Android device makers.
In a post on the official Google Blog titled 'Complying with the EC’s Android decision,' Google outlined a few changes coming to the Google app licensing agreements that it offers to Android OEMs. As you might recall from the numerous times we've written about it, this announcement is a change to the secretive 'Mobile Application Distribution Agreement' (MADA) document that is a requirement for getting access to the Play Store and other Google apps. What we think of as a commercial 'Android' device comes in two parts. The core Android OS is free and open source—anyone can take it and do whatever they want with it without Google's involvement. If you want the Play Store, Google Maps, Gmail, and all the other Google apps you need to make a viable commercial smartphone, though, you need to talk to Google and sign a MADA, which comes with a ton of restrictions.
The new rules
Google's new MADA makes three big changes. First, Google's blog states 'Android partners wishing to distribute Google apps may also build non-compatible, or forked, smartphones and tablets for the European Economic Area (EEA).' The last time we saw a MADA document (back in 2014), it had an 'anti-fragmentation' clause, which said that any company signing the agreement has to be all-in on Google's Android. If you produced any Android device without Google's apps, you got booted from the Google ecosystem. This means that a company like Amazon, which makes forked Kindle devices, could never ship a smartphone with Google apps.
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