Summary

John Gruber covers the European Commission's binding DMA guidance requiring Google to open Android's system-level AI capabilities to all third-party assistants on equal footing with Gemini, and to share Google Search user data with competitors. He finds the Android AI portion especially extraordinary in scope — it would grant competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Meta unfettered OS-level access to hardware buttons, microphones, cameras, screen content, and background processing. He outlines four scenarios for compliance, ranging from Google building unused APIs to full adoption causing privacy disasters. He concludes that Google faces a lose-lose choice: waste engineering resources building APIs for competitors, or demote Gemini to app status. He also warns the guidance foreshadows similar demands on Apple.

Key Insight

The EC's DMA guidance demands Google rebuild Android as a fundamentally open OS platform for all AI competitors, which Gruber sees as either practically dead on arrival (no one adopts it) or a genuine security and privacy catastrophe if they do.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  What the EC is dictating to Google is just breathtaking in scope.

• 8

  What the EC's 'guidance' describes in this document is an entirely different operating system than the Android that Google has designed.

• 7

  The European Commission obviously thinks it is their place to design operating systems.

• 4

  If Google supports this guidance, it could turn Android phones in the EU into PCs.

• 5

  This is a recipe for disaster, if Google were to enact it and third-party AI assistants took advantage of it.

• 7

  Either they waste a small fortune building APIs no one will use, or, they spend that small fortune building APIs for the benefit of their biggest competitors.

• 8

  If you are handed a mandate that everyone must be able to run at the same speed, and you can't figure out how to make slow people faster, you can comply by forcing the fast to wear weighted boots.

• 6

  And if those third-party assistant developers — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Meta — have different opinions than Google on how much CPU usage is appropriate in the background... well that's just tough noogies.

Tone

critical, skeptical, analytical