Android Phones in Turkey Will Lose Google Apps Amid Dispute

Google’s Android is facing more antitrust disputes, this time in Turkey. After Russian search engine Yandex filed a probe against the company in Turkey, the local competition authority found Google guilty and asked the company to make changes back in 2018.

Google was fined a whopping 93 million lira or $17.4 million at the time, but the company made changes to its contracts with Turkish business partners to meet the competition authority’s demands.

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The competition authority later found Google’s changes to be inadequate, after Google failed to allow changes to the default search engine options. Turkey’s competition authority has now imposed a fine on Google of 0.05% of its revenue per day, and it is also preventing the company from working with Turkish business partners on Android phones, reports Reuters. That means that new Android phones in Turkey will ship without Google apps, most notably Google Play. Google says that existing devices will continue to work as normal and that its other services will remain unaffected.

Google faced similar problems in the EU, too, but the company later introduced options to allow users to change the default search engine.

As for Turkey, Google has been giving a 60-day period to challenge the ruling, so it’s possible Google will be able to potentially fix this problem, and get its apps back on Android devices/