The Association of Trading Companies and Manufacturers of Electrical Household and Computer Equipment (RATEK; unites Samsung, Huawei, M.Video-Eldorado and others) criticizes the draft government decree, which obliges to provide the RuStore mobile application store with access to system settings and permissions.
How writes “Kommersant”developed by the Ministry of Digital Development, a draft government decree obliges companies to integrate RuStore into the device to the same extent as the store of the OS or device manufacturer.
RATEK said that this requirement is contrary to agreements with Google: in most cases, this is simply not feasible, since Google prohibits its system services (GMS) licensees from giving such privileges to third-party applications.
In addition, this move threatens handset manufacturers with problems on the global market: “An attempt to sell a device with GMS without a license in the Russian Federation may lead to the revocation of the license for the model all over the world.”
However, the Ministry of Digital Development did not respond to RATEK’s comments, so no changes were made to the project. The ministry said that the same Samsung and Xiaomi smartphones are pre-installed with app stores that are alternative to Google Play.
RuStore has made a list of programs that must be installed on smartphones sold in Russia from January 1. However, this does not apply to smartphones supplied by parallel import.
