On Thursday 24 July, ARTICLE 19, EDRi, Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF) and Homo Digitalis filed a complaint against Alphabet Inc., asking the European Commission to open an investigation into the company’s non-compliance with the Art 6(3) of the Digital Markets Act.
In its latest compliance report, and in the compliance workshop organised by the European Commission’s DMA enforcement team on 1 July 2025, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has demonstrated its continued refusal to effectively comply with Art 6(3) DMA, which obliges the gatekeepers whose operating systems (OS) have been designated as core platform services to enable users to uninstall pre-installed apps, including those from the gatekeeper itself.
Currently, Android, the mobile operating system developed by Google, only allows pre-installed apps to be ‘disabled’. Alphabet representatives have attempted to argue that ‘disabling’ is the same as ‘uninstalling’’, even though ‘disabled’ apps remain on users’ devices and are fully functional.
In our submission we argue that, contrary to Alphabet’s claims, removing and disabling a software application are two very different things, in particular from a user perspective. Android’s core platform service is also designed in a way to deliberately hide from end users the possibility to even disable the pre-installed gatekeeper apps. Not only that, Android also goes to great lengths to intimidate end users who have found that possibility – displaying a warning message that ‘if you disable this app, Android and other apps may no longer function as intended.’
This kind of deceptive design and the vague threat of a broken operating system is a clear violation of Alphabet’s obligations under Art 6(3) and 8(1) DMA – and can only be seen as an attempt to circumvent the DMA.
We therefore call on the European Commission to open non-compliance proceedings under Art 20 DMA to investigate Alphabet’s conduct.