Google might try to restrict Android access for some companies

Jan 27, 2014 11:56 GMT  ·  By

On Sunday, Samsung and Google announced a patent cross-license agreement that will allow each company to access patents that the other holds.

The two have had a close relationship in the past few years, one that helped Samsung become the leading smartphone maker out there, and which also pushed Android to the top of the mobile OS market.

With the aforementioned agreement, the two tighten their relation even more, and rumor has it that this could result in parts of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI being integrated into Android itself.

According to a tweet coming from Mobile-Review editor Eldar Murtazin, some of the features that Samsung has developed for its user interface will indeed be included in the platform, and other manufacturers will have to pay to access them.

Furthermore, he claims that Samsung will kill the development of Tizen smartphones moving forth, though the decision to do so might not have been influenced by Google, it seems.

A few years ago, Samsung killed the development of Bada OS-based smartphones as it decided to evolve the platform into Tizen, though it has delayed the launch of a handset running under the new OS for over a year.

There’s no telling on whether the South Korean vendor will make a similar move with its own mobile platform again, but it seems highly likely that it will.

The agreement with Google might also result in Motorola being phased out as a smartphone maker, as Google does not want to compete with Samsung in the hardware space, Murtazin also claims.

However, we doubt that this will actually happen, especially with Google investing a lot of money in the handset vendor in its attempt to turn it to profitability once again.

But the most interesting tidbit coming from Murtazin is that Google might work towards restricting some companies from developing devices running under Android, with Microsoft being one of them.

This would mean that the long-rumored Nokia Normandy would be doomed right from the beginning, as it won’t have access to apps and services otherwise available on Android-based devices.

However, Microsoft and Nokia are rumored to be working on their own set of apps for the smartphones, and this issue, should it actually exist, might be somehow addressed in this manner.

There’s no telling on whether the above will pan out, so take them with a grain of salt, especially since the tipster has proved wrong before. We do expect Google and its partners to try to put even more pressure on competition, but it remains to be seen whether they will do it in this manner.