E Foundation(/e/OS) asks EC: will the DMA help make the Android ecosystem more open and competitive?

At a Digital Markets Act (DMA) stakeholder workshop on the topic of “App store related provisions” organized by the European Commission (EC) on Feb, 6th 2023, E Foundation representative Rik Viergever asked how the DMA will help improve the interoperability between different mobile phone operating systems based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Google currently has a dominant market position in this ecosystem. Their use of proprietary services on top of AOSP makes it challenging for other operating systems (OS) that are built on AOSP, like /e/OS, to successfully make their OS compatible with all 5 million Android Apps.

Prof. Dr. Jan Krämer answers that “equivalence of inputs” is an important component of the DMA. He explains that articles 6.7 and 13 of the DMA apply for this issue, which prescribe interoperability requirements for “gatekeepers”.

Gatekeepers in the DMA are large organizations like Google who are currently dominant market parties in a software system. We hope that the European Commission will implement the DMA soon so that there will be better interoperability between AOSP-based operating systems like Google’s Android and /e/OS.

Have you checked out /e/OS yet? We make /e/OS, Murena cloud, and we sell Murena phones: smartphones with /e/OS and ecloud pre-installed.

Learn more about us at https://e.foundation and https://www.murena.com

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The entire DMA workshop footage is available at https://webcast.ec.europa.eu/dma-stak...