How Google protects its app ecosystem
When Google agreed to pull out their services from Chinese smartphones, the whole fiasco was around a single package, Google Mobile Services.
What is GMS?
GMS or Google Mobile Services is a set of services that Google requires to be on a smartphone so that all Google services are available on it. Be it Chrome, Youtube, Maps, PlayStore, etc. As per legal requirements from Google, any smartphone manufacturer who wants to have these apps available on their phones (or tablets) must pre-install this package of services “in a certain manner” on the device before the device can be shipped off to customers.
Background
If you want Facebook, TikTok, or Slack on your phone, you will need to get it installed from an app marketplace. You see, Google PlayStore is the world’s largest marketplace for apps. So, when you want to install those apps on your Samsung or LG phone, you will want Google PlayStore on your phone. You will most likely have never heard about many other app marketplaces out there, like APKPure.
Google’s upper hand
Here, Google plays the trick. Google requires that if a Samsung (or any other Android mobile phone user) wants Google’s PlayStore on a Samsung phone, Samsung will need to have the whole Google Mobile Services package on your phone. Only then, can you, as a Samsung phone user have the PlayStore app on your phone. I use Samsung as an example here, but this condition literally applies to every Android smartphone or tablet manufacturer.
Not only that, Google actually physically verifies every phone or tablet model that any vendor wants to publish. They check the device’s software to be Android Compatible through a set of “tests”, and then enter into an agreement called Mobile Application Distribution Agreement (MADA) with the smartphone manufacturer. Once these are in place, only then is the Google Mobile Services suite allowed to be distributed on that device.
Is there more to it?
There is one more little bit of detail to this. Within the Google Play Store app (that is also part of the GMS suite), there is a module called ‘Google Play Services’. This module is responsible for ensuring the validity of your phone or tablet as a Google-certified device, and it is through this module, that other Google services also “authenticate” themselves to function or not, on the phone.
So if you install a jacked-up version of YouTube app on a rooted Android phone, and the app does not work, it is most likely due to this module rejecting it.
You can find various “purified” versions of Play Store apps on app marketplaces like APKPure, but they are not guaranteed to work smoothly on your phone. In fact, Google does its best to ensure that backend calls from these modified versions of the actual PlayStore do not bypass any sort of security measures Google already has in place for its ecosystem of services.
As the first line of defense, all apps that are part of Google Mobile Services on your phone are made system apps. This means, without breaking the Operating System, you really cannot tamper with the apps.
As a second line of defense comes the security that the Google Play Services module provides to other Google apps.
It is not for an evil cause
Like any software manufacturer, Google has the rightful intention to protect its ecosystem of apps. Particularly, if those apps are available to you for free. Even the latest version of Apple devices cannot match up to the superior class of services that Google services provide. It is important for any such large-scale software manufacturer to take measures outside of their apps to ensure the security of their apps, and Google taking measures on protection on the Operating System layer simply makes a ton of sense.
Google services stopped on some Chinese phones
When the US government decided to pull out US services from phones built by Chinese manufacturers, and Google followed suit of this decision, essentially the “core” software piece that had to be pulled back by Google was the Google Play Services. Once the service was turned off from the backend for a certain class of Android phones, the Google Play Services app (or by extension, Google Mobile Services apps ) on them were no longer able to validate the phone they were running on and therefore not able to function properly.
I regularly write about different topics in tech including career guidance, the latest news, upcoming technologies, and much more. This blog was originally posted in my blogs at anirban-mukherjee.com
