Over the past few weeks, we’ve been following the ongoing Google antitrust lawsuit. Many of the revelations thus far have been interesting or even eyebrow-raising but still very business-focused.
Yesterday, however, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took to the stand (via The Verge). During his testimony, Pichai revealed a tidbit on how Google operates that gives a better look behind the curtain and could help explain users’ frustration with Android phones not seeing security updates. According to Pichai, Google financially incentivizes OEMs to update their phones. Companies that keep phones current with the latest security patches see a higher revenue share from Google services than those that don’t.
In other words, the amount of money an OEM makes from you using Google products on its device is correlated to how often it keeps that device up to date with security patches. This means Google intentionally strongarms OEMs to be better about updating phones, which is something we didn’t know before.
