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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Most Android manufacturers — including Huawei — are what’s known as Google hardware partners. This relationship lets them build their phones around a collection of Google products, from apps like Google Maps and Assistant, to under-the-hood tools like location services or push notifications. While Google gives off the impression that Android is open and available to everyone, these services represent a quiet control that the company doesn’t often enforce over its hardware partners — though, as it has now proven, it certainly can.

With the recent order, the U.S. government forced Google’s hand. The U.S. Department of Commerce put Huawei on the “Entity List,” which blocks it from buying technology from U.S. companies without government approval. Huawei and Google now have three months to send updates to existing users. For new phones, Huawei may be able to use the open-source version of Android, but it can’t be a Google partner.

The distinction between using Android and being a Google partner seems messy from the outside, but “Android” technically refers to the core operating system that covers basic things like making phone calls or using the camera. The freely available version of Android is called the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and a company doesn’t have to be a partner to use it.

Most manufacturers like Huawei, however, do choose to become a Google partner. That means Huawei agrees to only make devices that use a collection of Google apps known as Google Mobile Services which includes things like Gmail, YouTube, and the Google Play Store. Under this arrangement, Huawei can’t, for example, make a phone that ships with Microsoft’s Bing and Edge instead of Google Search and Chrome.

Partners also have to meet certain security and compatibility conditions. In exchange, they get access to all of Google’s apps and infrastructure, making their phones much more appealing to customers worldwide than they would otherwise be. This arrangement is usually free, though manufacturers who sell in the EU pay a fee and are exempt from the all-or-nothing condition for complicated legal reasons.

According to Bryan Pon, PhD, mobile platform researcher and co-founder of the data analytics firm Caribou Data, this gives Google a lot of control over its platform. “Consumers are attached to the Google products and services that sit on top of the operating system,” explains Pon. “Google has very strong proprietary control over those, and in that sense wields tremendous power, irrespective of the operating system.”

Additionally, Huawei, and Google’s other partners, have to include a collection of developer tools called Google Play Services. These background tools let app developers easily do things like create push notifications, embed maps in their apps, or get a GPS location. Most Android apps distributed through the Google Play Store rely on some of these tools to provide features that are too expensive or difficult for every developer to build themselves.

As Pon explains, some of these tools are crucial features that would normally be part of an operating system. “They’re actually taking functionality out of the core platform,” Pon says. “They’re leaving Android open source, more and more, just a shell. And that core functionality is now part of just proprietary Google services.” Google does this to make it easier to update important features without waiting for a big Android update, but the result consolidates Google’s power over its platform.

[...] Even if we could assume the best about Google’s intentions to keep Android as open as possible — and Google did not respond to a request by OneZero for comment — the Huawei order demonstrates that Google’s control can be abused by other entities. If the U.S. were in a trade war with South Korea instead of China, Samsung phones — still the most popular in the world over — could face a similar fate. Google can reaffirm its commitment to being “open” and “free” all it wants, but ultimately it’s still a gatekeeper.

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