Patriotism on the wire: officials proposed pre-installing only domestic applications in smartphones

Starting next year, sellers of smartphones and computers in Russia may be required to pre-install domestic analogues of browsers, mail, audio players and other applications on them. Devices themselves can eventually rise in price.

Details

• The author of this bold idea is the Federal Antimonopoly Service. According to Kommersant , such a proposal is included in the final version of the road map for the development of competition for 2018–2020. The legislative initiative should be formalized by April 2019.
• The most famous conflict about the pre-installation of applications and services in 2015 occurred between Google and the Federal Antimonopoly Service over a complaint from Yandex. But in the case of the products of Russian developers, there will be no restriction of competition, officials assure, because pre-installed Russian applications can be safely removed if necessary.
• The desire of FAS to help Russian developers can be understood, but new requirements for equipment will lead to new costs on the part of companies, experts interviewed by the publication say. In addition, it is not clear how global equipment vendors will fulfill the requirements for preinstalling applications for the local Russian market. As a result, the final price of smartphones and computers is likely to rise, they warn.

What do I get from this?

Many Russian apps are convenient and in high demand among Russians – in 2017 they ranked 11 in the top 20 in terms of the number of downloads. But this does not mean that you will really like to find in a brand new smartphone, instead of something familiar, an unpopular browser of a domestic developer.

Irina Malkova