EU DMA cracks Android open to rival AI assistants

The default AI assistant on a phone is a distribution channel, and until last week Google owned that channel outright on Android. The European Commission just pried it open. On July 16 it adopted binding specification decisions under the Digital Markets Act requiring Google to give competing AI assistants the same system-level access Gemini enjoys — and, separately, to share Google Search data with rival search engines and AI chatbots. If you sell anything findable, the EU DMA just changed how many front doors your business has.

What actually happened

Per the European Commission, these are binding specification measures, not suggestions. Two sets.

The first covers Android AI interoperability. Today, third-party assistants get restricted access to the operating system while Google's own services get all of it. Under the decision, competitors must be able to be activated by voice — the Commission's own comparison is the "Hey Google" command — and to perform actions inside apps on the user's behalf. The Commission's examples: booking a taxi, generating relevant replies in chat apps, answering questions about a recently visited place. The Commission notes 60% of EU users are on Android devices.

The second covers Search data. Google must share the data it uses to optimize its own search results with third-party search engines and with AI chatbots that offer search functionality, subject to a multi-layered anonymisation method the Commission developed with privacy experts and aligned to the draft joint DMA/GDPR guidelines with the EDPB. There's a transparent pricing formula and access process attached.

On timing: the Commission's announcement doesn't state deadlines. Search Engine Land reports data sharing begins January 2027 with the Android changes expected July 2027. Treat those as reported, not as text from the decision.

Why it matters for your business

Two things follow, and neither requires you to have a single European customer.

First, assistant plurality is now structural. When ChatGPT or Claude can be the thing a user summons by voice and hand a task to inside apps, "rank on Google" stops being the whole discovery strategy. The winners will be businesses whose hours, inventory, prices, and booking flows are machine-readable by any assistant — clean structured data, a real API or feed, no critical information trapped in a JPEG or a PDF menu.

Second, forced data sharing makes rival search engines and answer engines viable in a way funding rounds never did. The moat was never the algorithm; it was the query log. Prying that open means more surfaces you can be found on — and more surfaces to keep accurate.

The operator move is unglamorous: stop optimizing for one channel and start maintaining one canonical source of truth about your business that you can syndicate anywhere. Regulators are reshuffling the distribution deck roughly every quarter now. You don't want your discoverability to be a bet on which platform wins.

Sources: European Commission — Digital Markets Act, Search Engine Land.