I don't think they should be forced to support installing other OSes on their own phones at all. Pixels have a tiny market share. Perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to provide Pixel exclusive advantages from their other services, such as free photo storage, but beyond that...
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... it all has to do with Play services and the licensing arrangements for it. Don't really see much that's anti-competitive about Pixels themselves aside from minor cases where they offer advantages to using a Pixel based on their services like past free photo storage deals.
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The reason I ask is that other monopoly cases have relied on looking at specific products as hardware+software combos. This was true re: Microsoft ruling and x86, and one of the reasons Gates was asked about alternative OS's and if there were barriers to installing them on x86 1/
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It was also why "Linux" was mentioned as part of the claim that Microsoft was not a monopoly. I'm interested in the Google product line partially for this reason, but also some other potential legal arguments re: consumer protection I've been ruminating on. 2/2
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Their monopoly is on push notifications, search, maps, and the other APIs they provide to apps. Apple has a similar monopoly on their own platform. Both are highly anti-competitive. They advantage their own apps and services in ways that aren't available to other apps.
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Due to their monopolies on these APIs / services, phones without Play services aren't competitive, and their design prevents users from installing it on an Android compatible device. It has to be built into the OS with those special privileges unavailable to other apps.
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Should be possible for a company like Amazon or Facebook to do a lawsuit about the push service alone. They should be able to offer a competing push service that's not disadvantaged (Android) or completely incapable of working (iOS) without wrapping the Apple / Google services.
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Though I agree on all points, Google still has strong arguments supporting the right to provide that functionality exclusively via Google services (and there are many precedents). This is esp. true since alternatives exist, however bad or limited (Websockets, SSE, OpenPush, etc.)
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Them forbidding those alternatives for apps on the Play Store and forcing them to have an inferior UX is what's anti-competitive, along with forcing usage of Play services and the Play Store in order to use their push service. Should not be bundled together. Should be separate.
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They do not have a legitimate technical reason for it all being bundled together like it is. Every other service provider on Android has to make their services available as proper libraries not requiring them to be built-in to the OS with special privileges unavailable to others.
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If I use FCM as an app developer, it should work on a device that is Android compatible and doesn't have FCM. It is anti-competitive to require that device to bundle a ton of Google services with special privileges.
If I use another push service, I should be able to use that while still using the Play Store. It should also be possible to match the user interface of Google's service. What's anti-competitive is that they use their services with monopolies to help each other out unfairly.