What the Digital Markets Act means for Android, AI assistants, user choice, and the silent power of default settings.
When Your Phone Answers, Who is Allowed to Speak?
You ask your phone for help. Maybe you are cooking and your hands are covered in flour, or driving, or late, or half-charged, or trying to remember whether the meeting is at 10:00 or 10:30 while also pretending you are not annoyed with the entire universe. You say the little phrase your phone recognises, and the assistant wakes up. It answers, searches, opens something, suggests a route, adds a reminder, reads a message, or tries very hard to be helpful while occasionally misunderstanding the simplest possible instruction.
It feels like a private moment between you and your device, but behind that tiny moment sits a much larger question: who was allowed to answer? A phone assistant is not only a friendly voice. It is connected to the operating system, the microphone, the screen, the apps, the search engine, the calendar, the map, the notification layer, the browser, the data trail, and the permissions that decide what can act on your behalf. The assistant that can wake up easily, understand context, move across apps, and perform tasks in the background is not just another app. It is closer to a new interface layer between the user and the digital world.
That is why the European Union is interested. Brussels did not suddenly develop strong feelings about whether your phone should sound cheerful before telling you it cannot find your headphones. The issue is deeper than that. In digital markets, choice is not limited to whether you can download another app. Real choice depends on defaults, permissions, interoperability, access to data, system integration, and whether a rival service can actually work inside the environment where people already live their digital lives. In other words, the question is not only whether you can install another AI assistant. The better question is whether that assistant can actually function as an assistant.
The Phone Is Becoming an Interface to Everything
For years, smartphones have been described as devices. That is still true, but it is increasingly incomplete. A smartphone is also a wallet, a map, a camera, a calendar, a notebook, a search portal, a memory machine, a workplace, a school bag, a health tracker, a family coordination centre, and the small glowing rectangle through which many people now negotiate daily life. AI assistants may intensify that role because, if they become more capable, they may not simply answer isolated questions. They may coordinate tasks across apps, understand context, draft replies, summarise content, book services, compare options, retrieve information, interpret what is on screen, and act on the user’s behalf.
That could be useful. It could also make the assistant one of the most important gateways inside the device. If one company controls the operating system and also gives its own assistant deeper access to that system, rival assistants may technically exist while being practically disadvantaged. They may be available to download, but less convenient to activate. They may be intelligent, but unable to access enough context. They may be present on the phone, but not truly integrated into it. One assistant becomes part of the nervous system. The others are politely waiting behind icons.
This matters because most users do not redesign their phones from first principles. They use what is easiest, most visible, most integrated, and least annoying to configure. Life is busy, settings menus are often hostile to human dignity, and no ordinary person wants to spend Saturday afternoon conducting a constitutional convention inside their device. Default settings are not neutral. They are behavioural architecture.
Why Digital Choice Is Not Just Downloading Another App
Digital choice is often described as if it begins and ends with availability. Can you download another browser? Can you install another assistant? Can you create an account with a different service? If the answer is yes, the market may look open from the surface. But digital markets are shaped not only by whether alternatives exist, but by whether alternatives are usable, visible, trusted, integrated, and convenient enough to become real options.
A user may technically be free to choose a rival AI assistant, but if that assistant cannot be activated easily, cannot access the features it needs, cannot act across apps, cannot run in the background, or cannot understand enough context to be genuinely useful, the choice is weaker than it looks. It is not fake, exactly, but it is thinner than the word “choice” suggests. It is like being told you can choose any door you want, while one door is open, lit, signposted, and connected to the building, and the other is technically available somewhere behind six settings menus and a warning screen.
This is why default settings matter so much. Convenience is power. A service that works immediately has an advantage over a service that requires extra steps, extra permissions, extra configuration, and extra patience. In ordinary life, people do not choose tools under laboratory conditions. They choose while tired, busy, distracted, and trying to get something done. A rival service that requires users to fight the device before they can use it is not competing on equal terms with the service already built into the device.
What the Digital Markets Act Is Trying to Do
The Digital Markets Act, or DMA, is the EU’s attempt to make digital markets fairer and more contestable by setting rules for very large platforms that act as “gatekeepers.” These are companies that control important access points in the digital economy: operating systems, app stores, search engines, marketplaces, browsers, advertising systems, or other core platform services. The DMA does not say that large platforms are bad simply because they are large. The concern is what happens when the same company both controls the gate and competes with everyone trying to pass through it.
The word “gatekeeper” is useful because it names a kind of power that is easy to miss. Some companies do not only sell products in a market. They shape the conditions under which other products can be found, installed, activated, trusted, paid for, connected, or used. They define the rules of access. They decide what is easy, what is buried, what is seamless, what is technically possible, and what requires users to fight their own device.
This is why the current AI assistant debate is so interesting. In the older version of this conversation, the focus was on app stores, browsers, search engines, marketplaces, and operating systems. Now the same logic is being applied to AI assistants. The question is shifting from the old internet problem of whether competitors can reach users to a newer AI problem: can competitors function properly once they get there?
What the Commission Decided About Google, Android and AI Assistants
In July 2026, the European Commission issued two sets of binding specification measures to Google under the DMA. One set concerns AI interoperability on Android. The other concerns sharing certain Google Search data with eligible competitors. The Commission says the aim is to give European users a wider and more feature-rich range of options for AI services on Android and for search services.
The Android part is the one that feels most immediate. The Commission argues that competing AI assistants on Android currently face restricted access to key operating-system functionalities, while Google’s own AI services, such as Gemini, may benefit from deeper access. It also notes that around 60% of European mobile users use Android devices, which means the way Android structures access has consequences far beyond a technical developer dispute.
Under Article 6(7) of the DMA, Google must provide developers with free and effective interoperability with hardware and software features controlled by Android. The Commission’s specification proceedings were opened in January 2026 and led to a final decision in July 2026 covering 11 Android features relevant for AI services. These include invocation, context, actions on apps and the operating system, access to resources, hardware and software resources, on-device AI models, and background execution. These are not decorative features. They determine whether an assistant can be woken by voice, understand what the user is doing with consent, act across apps, and perform useful tasks beyond its own small corner of the phone.
Translated into ordinary language, the issue is this: if Google’s own AI assistant can use the phone’s deeper functions, should rival assistants be unfairly locked out of those functions? The Commission’s answer is no. That does not mean every assistant gets unlimited access to everything. It means that the gatekeeper must provide effective interoperability so competing services can offer users a genuine alternative. A rival assistant should not have to compete with one hand tied behind its back simply because it was not built by the company that controls the operating system.
This is where the title becomes less silly than it sounds. Your phone may soon have more than one brain, but the question is whether each brain is allowed to connect to the body. An AI assistant that can wake up by voice, understand context, act across apps, and run in the background is not competing in the same way as an assistant that waits behind an icon. One is integrated into the phone. The other is merely present on it.
Why Search Data Matters for AI Assistants Too
The second part of the Commission’s decision concerns Google Search data. Search may feel like yesterday’s internet compared with AI assistants, but it is actually central to the next stage. AI assistants and AI search tools need fresh information, retrieval systems, ranking signals, query understanding, and access to the web. They do not become useful only by sounding confident. They become useful by being able to find, rank, retrieve, and ground information well.
Google Search has had a huge advantage here because it has operated at extraordinary scale for years. The Commission says Google Search has held more than 90% market share in Europe for decades, giving it access to user data that other search engines cannot match. Under Article 6(11) of the DMA, Google must share anonymised search data with eligible online search engines under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. The Commission’s specification proceedings are intended to make that obligation effective, including for AI chatbots offering search functionalities.
Again, the simple version is that search engines learn from searches. They learn what people ask, what results are shown, what users click, which results appear useful, which spelling corrections matter, how queries change, and what kinds of results satisfy different questions. If one search engine has decades of this data at enormous scale, and if search becomes part of AI assistant competition, then the old search advantage may become a new AI advantage.
This is why the Commission treats search data as part of the competition story. A rival AI assistant may have good models, good design, and strong user interest, but if the information infrastructure behind it is weaker, it may struggle to compete. Users will not choose alternatives out of civic duty for very long. They choose tools that work. If alternatives are to compete, they need enough access to become good.
The Counterargument: Openness Can Create Real Risks
This is where the counterargument becomes important, because Google’s concerns are not ridiculous. Google argues that the Commission’s decisions could weaken privacy and security protections for European users. In its response, Google says the Android ruling could grant external apps sensitive and powerful device permissions without the safeguards that normally come through Android’s existing security and device-maker vetting processes. It also argues that private searches could be exposed to unfamiliar companies, creating risks for privacy, business secrets, and security.
This argument should not be dismissed simply because it comes from Google. There are real risks in opening system-level access. AI assistants are not weather widgets. They may request access to microphones, screens, context, apps, messages, calendars, location, browser activity, or background functions. If a weak, malicious, careless, or poorly governed assistant receives deep access to a phone, the consequences could be serious. Users may not understand what they are granting. Consent screens may become too frequent to be meaningful. Security review may become harder. Device integrity may be affected. Bad actors may try to exploit new pathways.
The same is true for search data. Anonymisation is important, but anonymisation is not magic dust sprinkled over risk. Search queries can be sensitive. They can reveal health worries, political interests, financial stress, family problems, legal concerns, location patterns, and intimate questions people ask only because they believe a search box is private enough. Even when personal identifiers are removed, data protection still depends on how data is processed, aggregated, restricted, audited, and protected from re-identification or misuse.
So yes, there is a real tension here. Open too little, and dominant platforms can lock competitors out while telling users they have choice. Open too much, or open badly, and the phone becomes a more dangerous environment. The question is not whether openness is always good. The question is what kind of openness is safe enough, accountable enough, and meaningful enough to make competition real without turning users into the price of competition.
The Counter-Counterargument: Security Can Also Protect Market Power
At the same time, we need to be honest about another possibility. Security and privacy are real concerns, but they can also be used as arguments to preserve control. This is one of the hardest problems in digital regulation. The company that controls the platform often knows more about the technical risks than regulators, competitors, or users. That expertise is valuable, and it may also be self-interested. When a gatekeeper says, “Only we can keep this safe,” it may be telling the truth, or it may be defending a closed system that benefits from being closed. Often, it may be doing both.
This is why the EU cannot simply accept either side’s framing. If regulators treat all gatekeeper concerns as excuses, they may create dangerous rules. If they treat all gatekeeper concerns as decisive, they may allow safety language to become a permanent barrier to competition. The hard work is to design access with safeguards. The Commission says its search-data decision requires anonymisation of end-user personal data and includes technical, organisational, administrative and contractual protections, as well as audit mechanisms and eligibility criteria for who can access the data.
That is the regulatory balancing act: not “open everything,” and not “trust the gatekeeper forever,” but controlled access, defined purposes, safeguards, audits, restrictions, and accountability. Whether that will work in practice is the question worth debating. The Commission can design procedures, but implementation will matter. Competitors will have to prove trustworthiness. Google will have to comply in ways that do not make access useless. Regulators will have to monitor whether safeguards work. Users will have to understand enough about their choices to make them meaningful. This is not a neat story with a clean hero and a clean villain. It is a story about competing risks.
What Does User Choice Really Mean?
This whole debate becomes more meaningful when we stop treating “choice” as a surface-level concept. In ordinary conversation, choice sounds simple. You either can choose something, or you cannot. But digital choice is more complicated because the environment shapes the options before the user arrives. A user may be free to install another assistant, but if that assistant cannot be activated easily, cannot access enough context, cannot perform tasks across apps, and cannot operate smoothly in the background, the user is likely to return to the default. Not necessarily because the default is better, but because the default is easier.
Convenience is power. Digital markets are not only shaped by price or quality. They are shaped by friction. A service that requires five extra steps is not competing on equal terms with one that works immediately. A tool buried in settings is not competing equally with one that appears during setup. A rival assistant that cannot use system-level functions is not competing equally with the assistant built into the operating system.
This is why “you can download another app” is often an incomplete answer. It is like saying a small shop can compete with a supermarket because both technically exist in the same city, while ignoring that one is on every main road, has exclusive parking, owns the delivery network, controls the map, and appears as the default option whenever anyone searches for food. Existence is not the same as access. Access is not the same as usability. Usability is not the same as meaningful choice. The DMA is trying to regulate that difference.
What Could Go Right?
If the Commission’s approach works, European users may see more meaningful competition between AI assistants. A user could choose a preferred assistant and have it function more deeply inside Android. Smaller or alternative providers could build services that compete on quality rather than being trapped outside the operating-system layer. AI search services could improve because they gain access to certain search data under defined conditions. The market could become less dependent on one company’s default position. Users could have more paths through digital life.
That optimistic version is not trivial. If AI assistants become central to how people search, work, learn, shop, communicate and organise tasks, then preventing that layer from becoming locked early could matter enormously. The internet has already taught us that defaults, data advantages and platform control can shape markets for decades. The AI assistant layer may become another moment where early architecture hardens into long-term power. If the EU gets this right, it may help keep that layer more open.
It may also support better innovation. When alternatives can genuinely compete, the market may produce assistants with different strengths: more privacy-focused assistants, more specialised professional assistants, assistants designed around accessibility, assistants that work better in specific languages, or assistants connected to different search and knowledge ecosystems. Competition is not only about giving users more logos to choose from. At its best, it creates pressure to improve the actual experience.
What Could Go Wrong?
But there is also a less optimistic version. If interoperability is implemented badly, users may face confusing permission systems, weaker device protections, or assistants that request more access than they need. If the search data-sharing system is poorly governed, sensitive data could be mishandled, or supposedly limited data could be used in ways users did not expect. If the compliance burden is too complex, only larger competitors may be able to benefit, while smaller actors remain excluded. If the rules are too rigid, they may struggle to keep pace with technical change.
There is also a more subtle possibility: the EU may succeed in opening access, but users may not care. Regulation can create the possibility of choice, but it cannot force people to exercise that choice. Many users may continue using the default because it is familiar, good enough, or already connected to everything else. Competitors may gain access and still fail to offer a better experience. Choice screens may appear and be ignored. Interoperability may improve competition at the margins without changing everyday behaviour very much.
That would not mean the effort is pointless, but it does remind us that regulation is not magic either. The EU can open doors. It cannot make people walk through them. A fairer market still needs credible products, clear design, real user trust, and alternatives that are not only available, but good enough to become habits.
The Deeper Question: Who Governs the Assistant Layer?
The deeper question is not whether one decision about Google is good or bad. The deeper question is how the assistant layer should be governed. If AI assistants become the new interface to digital life, then they sit at the intersection of several forms of power. They are shaped by operating systems, search engines, app ecosystems, hardware permissions, data flows, cloud infrastructure, model providers, privacy rules, safety standards, and user habits. They are not only products. They are arrangements of power.
That means the governance question cannot be reduced to competition alone. Competition matters, but it is not enough. A more competitive market can still be unsafe. A safer system can still be anti-competitive. A privacy-preserving design can still entrench the dominant company if no one else can interoperate. An open design can still create risks if users cannot understand or control what they are granting. The real task is to hold several values together: competition, privacy, security, user choice, innovation, accountability, interoperability, device integrity, transparency, and consumer protection.
That is hard, which is why this article should not pretend there is a neat answer. The point is not that the EU is obviously right in every detail. The point is that the EU is forcing a necessary question into the open: if AI assistants become infrastructure, should the owner of the operating system decide alone who gets meaningful access to that infrastructure? That question deserves public discussion, because it will shape not only companies, but ordinary users.
EU in Practice: A Voice Command, a Default Setting, and a Regulatory Fight
The most revealing thing about this story is how ordinary it looks from the outside. A phone. A voice assistant. A search result. A default setting. A permission request. None of these things feel like constitutional questions. Yet together, they shape how people access information, how businesses reach users, how new services compete, how data flows, and how much practical control individuals have over their digital environment.
That is why EU in Practice matters. The European Union often appears in public life as something distant, procedural, slow, and covered in acronyms. Sometimes it is. But the real story of EU regulation is often much more concrete. It appears in the charger that fits more devices. The roaming charge that disappeared. The privacy banner that asks for consent. The platform rule that changes what defaults you see. The competition case that decides whether another service has a chance. And now, perhaps, the assistant that answers when you speak to your phone.
Your phone may soon have more than one brain. That sounds funny, and it is. There is something beautifully absurd about imagining your phone as a small committee of competing artificial minds, each politely raising a hand to answer your question about pasta boiling time. But beneath the humour is a serious issue. When AI assistants become gateways to everyday digital life, the rules that shape their access will matter.
Closing: More Than Choosing Between Icons
If only one assistant can fully use the device, choice becomes thinner than it appears. If every assistant can access everything without strong safeguards, safety and privacy become fragile. If search data remains locked inside one company’s long-standing advantage, competition may never catch up. If search data is shared carelessly, users may pay the price. That is the tension, and it is precisely why the debate matters.
The EU is not simply saying “more AI, please.” It is asking how competition, interoperability, privacy and user choice should work when AI moves from being a separate tool into the infrastructure of daily life. That is exactly where public debate should be: not only on whether AI assistants are clever, not only on whether Google is too powerful, not only on whether the EU regulates too much, but on what kind of digital environment we want to live in when the next interface layer is being built.
Because the next time you say “Hey…” to your phone, the answer may depend not only on technology. It may depend on law, competition, privacy, security, and the still-unfinished question of whether digital choice should mean more than choosing between icons.
