Thanks for the link. I thought I vaguely remembered hearing something about this before.

Just as with Microsoft and Amazon, I get why Google does this, but I think it hurts users and pretty much guarantees there's going to be limited Android experiences for lots of users out there. "Take all our apps, on our terms, or take none," pretty much guarantees the Microsofts and Amazons of the world are going to take none.

Andorid may be an open platform but it's primary app distribution channel clearly is not. It's an interesting contortion...they don't qualitatively screen apps, but they effectively screen what flavor of the platform can have the chief app repository itself.

They often also cause a bad experience. 512MB Android devices are cheap and popular, but they run poorly when Google+, Google Play Books, Google Play Newsstand, etc. are always running in the background. Most people won't go to the trouble of disabling all of them and won't realize that their devices can actually run well. It would be easy to feature them prominently inside Google Play instead of pre-installing them.