The Core

"The alternative is to use none of Google's suite of apps, and thus you don't get access to the official Play Store."

EU phones will then be about where Amz Fire tablets are.  I install the apks on Fire which allows loading of Playstore, it takes 15 minutes. Still that will be toooo technical for the great majority of users.

In the short run I don't think there is an actual difference other than sleight of hand accounting.

They will charge a licensing fee for one app (that was formerly free) & then likely slightly lift the payment they offer for taking the others, so it will net out to pretty close to zero.

Higher licensing revenues offset by perhaps equally higher traffic acquisition costs.

Which ultimately will mean if Microsoft or someone else wants to outbid Google they'll have to bid more than Google values the traffic & they'll also ultimately be paying part of the Android licensing fee with their bid.

This was a point Ben Thompson made on Stratechery today.

Also worth noting by the time Windows Phone was dead Microsoft was already offering a free license.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2139080/microsoft-makes-windows-free-on-iot-and-small-mobile-devices-but-not-pcs.html
That never took though because it was too bloated & they didn't have the developer support back then.

Paradoxically, in the years since, now the "free & open" Android has many important pieces carved out of the core OS, and is up to 6 gigs in size
http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
and it now charges a licensing fee

interesting roll reversal...Microsoft lost mobile because they did a port of Windows desktop that was too bloated and wanted paid for license. After they lost bad enough they made licenses available free but didn't matter as developers were already supporting Android and they were toast. Quietly Android becomes ever more bloated and now is up to 6 gigs in size for the OS. And now because of EU fine Google will make core Android free but has ripped out important hooks to leave it as useless junk without the other bits & now they are able to start charging licensing fees for the other stuff
http://www.eweek.com/blogs/first-read/is-android-really-open-source

They better hope Jeff Bezos doesn't take interest.

For whatever reason they have been happy with just monetizing their share of the 10% of searches that are highly commercial or such & they haven't put much effort into general web search. Even when they ran A9 it quickly became more of a internal site search project than a web search project & as recently as this year the web search option hosted on Amazon.com was powered by Google.

Amazon took down their web search page earlier this year
https://www.amazon.com/websearch

The web search home page is no longer available. Please update your default home page.

no idea why they would just throw that traffic away. I am sure they could get an 80%+ revshare from either Bing or Google do host a reskinned web search offering there.

>Was that something shown to their tablet users as a default?

I have owned about a half-dozen Fire tablets and I've never stumbled across it.