Microsoft Says 74 Android OEMs Now Pre-Installing Its Apps; Acer Joins List
Microsoft's Windows Phone may have lost the battle to Android in capturing substantial market share, but it doesn't mean that there won't be footprints of the company's services and apps on your Android device.
Context & Ripple Effects
After iPhone and Android took 96.8 percent of new smartphone sales, Microsoft stopped fighting for mobile OS share and started renting shelf space on its rivals' hardware instead. The build-out has been steady: over 100 active apps across iOS and Android by early 2015, a minority stake in Cyanogen to keep its apps inside an alternative Android distribution, and preinstall deals with Dell, Pegatron and eight regional OEMs a year ago.
The Acer addition pushes the OEM count to 74, showing that what began as flagship partnerships with Samsung and Dell has become standard practice across the long tail of device makers. The endpoint of this arc shows up later in the corpus: Android app mirroring in Windows 10 treats Android as the de facto mobile companion to Windows.
First-order effects
- Acer devices now ship with Microsoft apps preloaded alongside Windows' own software, giving Microsoft guaranteed placement on every unit without paying the customer-acquisition cost of app-store marketing.
- The other 73 OEMs in the program see the same bundle economics — Microsoft gets distribution, they get incremental licensing or differentiation value at near-zero integration cost.
Second-order effects
- Google faces a crowded default screen on Android hardware it doesn't fully control: every Microsoft-preinstalled Office or Skype slot displaces space where Google's own apps or carrier bloatware would otherwise sit.
- Rival platform players like Apple now compete against Microsoft services distributed free through third-party hardware, eroding the assumption that iOS exclusivity protects Apple's service attach rates.
Third-order effects
- Microsoft's structural pivot from owning the phone OS to being a services layer atop someone else's OS becomes self-reinforcing: each new OEM signing lowers the strategic value of ever reviving Windows Phone, locking in the services-first model.
- If preinstalled distribution proves cheaper than OS ownership, expect other displaced platform owners to treat rival ecosystems as neutral territory — hardware makers become the arbiters of whose software ships first.
The trend: Platform owners who lose the OS war convert their software catalogs into preinstall-distribution businesses on the winning ecosystem's hardware.