European Commission orders Alphabet to open 11 Android features to rival AI assistants

The European Commission adopted a specification decision on 16 July 2026 requiring Alphabet to give competing AI services free and effective interoperability with eleven Android features, on terms equally effective to those Google's own services enjoy. The decision is case DMA.100220, taken under Article 6(7) of the Digital Markets Act. Proceedings opened on 27 January 2026, a public consultation followed, and the non-confidential text of the measures is to be published.

The eleven features sit in four groups. Two cover invocation: long-press on the home button or navigation handle, and always-on hotword detection that works with the display off or in battery-saving mode. Three cover context: centralised access to apps' on-device data, of the kind Google's own services obtain through AppSearch; context-aware intelligence, meaning proactive suggestions without the user invoking anything; and ambient data, which the Commission describes as a continuous stream of real-time inputs and outputs from a device's core sensors, naming microphone, camera, screen and speakers. Three cover actions: structured on-device integration, which includes access to Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Maps, YouTube, Messages and Phone; screen automation for multi-step tasks; and system integration. Three cover resources: access to system-level on-device models including Gemini Nano, the ability to install and run a third party's own models under the same hardware and background-execution conditions Google's get, and timely background execution.

Google must ship all of it in Android 18 by 1 August 2027 at the latest, except concurrent hotword detection for more than one assistant, which is due in Android 19 by 1 August 2028. It must provide complete documentation and technical assistance, and release new functionality to third parties at the same time as to its own services. It must report to the Commission on design, development, implementation and release throughout the two-year window.

A specification decision takes no position on whether the gatekeeper is currently compliant, and it carries no fine.

The five features that come with a gate

Five of the eleven are not simply opened. Screen automation, structured on-device integration, system integration, centralised access to apps' on-device data and context-aware intelligence are subject to eligibility conditions on privacy, security and integrity. Google publishes draft terms by 1 February 2027 and final terms by 1 May 2027, and must complete a certification assessment within four weeks of receiving an application. Certification is done by Google together with independent third parties, and the decision provides that no further commercial requirements may be imposed.

Writing on the Wolters Kluwer competition blog, Alba Ribera Martínez argues that this is a retreat from the Commission's own April draft implementation measures. Her reading is that the restricted-features regime reintroduces gatekeeper discretion that the Commission had explicitly foreclosed in the parallel Apple decision, that transparency obligations were cut so that only final feature implementation reports reach the Commission automatically while others come on request, and that specific API obligations were softened into outcome language about equivalent functionalities, which is materially harder to verify. She characterises the net effect as a move from fire-alarm oversight, where public reporting lets third parties raise the alarm themselves, to police-patrol enforcement, where the Commission must go looking. [UNVERIFIED: this is one analyst's comparison of the draft and final measures. The April draft was not read, and the non-confidential text of the final decision was not available at the time of writing. The Commission's own page confirms the five restricted features, the certification role for Google and independent third parties, and the February and May 2027 deadlines.]

Why it matters

This publication's usual subject is decentralization by architecture: a protocol, a market rule or a piece of hardware that distributes control because of how it is built, and which therefore needs no permanent referee. The DMA is the other method. It is decentralization by mandate, and the two fail in different places.

An architecture that distributes control is self-enforcing once deployed. An interface opened by order is enforced only for as long as someone is watching, and the watching is done by one directorate in Brussels standing in a two-year reporting relationship with the firm it supervises. The control does not move to the edge. It moves from Mountain View to Brussels, and what reaches the edge is whatever survives the translation.

The specific place that translation happens is not the list of eleven features. It is the certification gate on five of them, and those five are the valuable ones: reading what your apps hold, acting on your screen, integrating with the system. Invocation and hotword detection matter, but an assistant that can be summoned and cannot do anything is a novelty. The decision gives Google the pen on the eligibility criteria for exactly the features that count, with a first draft due ten months before the software ships, and a certification it administers on a four-week clock. What a rival AI service has been granted is not access. It is the right to apply, against terms its competitor will write.

The timetable is the second thing worth noticing. Thirteen months from decision to the first deliverable and just over two years to the last, in a market where assistant defaults are being set now. Remedies that arrive after a default has hardened are a different remedy from the one that was ordered, which is an argument for building systems that do not require a regulator to pry them open rather than an argument against the DMA.

None of which makes the decision wrong. Article 6(7) is the closest thing in European law to a right to interoperate, and using it on an operating system rather than on a messaging app is a real escalation. It is worth being precise about what it produces: not an open platform, but a supervised one, on a schedule, with a gate.

What is still unknown

Whether Alphabet has appealed or signalled an appeal. Nothing was found either way.

Whether the decision reaches Android forks and OEM skins, or only Google's own builds, and whether it applies outside the European Union. Neither question is addressed on the Commission's page or in the analysis read.

What "equally effective" means operationally, and who adjudicates a dispute about it before August 2027. The certification terms are Google's to draft; the standard they must meet is the Commission's to enforce, and no interim milestone between the February 2027 draft terms and the August 2027 release was identified.

Whether any AI service has said it intends to apply, and on what timeline it would need the interfaces to be useful.

A separately reported obligation on Alphabet to share anonymised Google Search data with rival search engines and chatbots, with a pricing-offer deadline in January 2027, appears in secondary coverage but not on the Commission page fetched here. It may be a distinct decision adopted the same day. [UNVERIFIED, and deliberately not relied on above.]

Sources

European Commission, DMA developer portal, Alphabet specification proceedings on interoperability with AI services, case DMA.100220: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/developer-portal/interoperability/alphabet-specification-proceedings-interoperability-ai-services_en

European Commission, DMA interoperability portal: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/developer-portal/interoperability_en

Alba Ribera Martínez, "Keeping the Gate", Wolters Kluwer competition blog: https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/competition-blog/keeping-the-gate-the-european-commission-issues-its-specification-decision-on-alphabets-operating-system-interoperability-with-ai-assistants/