Google Removes YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show, Says it Violates their ToS
Amazon and Google have been going back and forth for a few years now. They seem to not want to play nice with each other due to the large competitive overlap of their products and services, and in some case it’s resulted in a worse user experience for the end user. We see this conflict with products such as Amazon Prime Video, Google Home and more. This week, users found that their YouTube application was no longer working on the Amazon Echo Show as access to it was removed by Google.
This rivalry between Google and Amazon is nothing new and it’s something that has had a negative impact on users for years (though, at the same time, such competition likely had many unseen benefits). For example, the Amazon Prime Video application has never had support for Chromecast because Amazon wants you to buy their Fire TV Stick instead. This upsets Google and so they found a reason for them to remove the application from the Play Store. Thankfully it’s back now, but it still doesn’t have support for Chromecast.
Amazon holds a grudge too and not only refuses to sell the Chromecast on their website, but also refuses to sell the Google Home in their store as well. Searching for either of these two Google products shows Amazon’s alternative towards the top of the list, again a result of the overlap between both their products and services. While competition itself certainly pushes these companies to leapfrog each other with their respective endeavors, a sizable chunk of their customers would like to see Google and Amazon meet somewhere in the middle to make everyday services simpler and more seamless.
Now, Google says that Amazon’s implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates their terms of service and creates a broken user experience for the customer. Amazon is seemingly upset about it because they feel there isn’t a technical reason as to why Google did this, and that they did so without an explanation to Amazon or a notification to their customers.
Source: TechCrunch
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