[Nexus 4 General] flx-grafix:
I'd like to try and clear things a little bit up regarding the warranty/guarantee issue. I can only speak for Germany (and therefore perhaps the EU).

The problem starts with a translation issue, here in Germany there are two types of guarantee/warranty. One is called "Garantie" and the other "Gewährleistung". Both can be translated in "guarantee" (which sounds similar to "Garantie") and warranty. Even here, customers are often confused about the differences between those two.

I try to explain, dunno if I get every single aspect right:

"Garantie" is provided by the manufacturer and not dependent on a certain country. The company that produces the product CAN give you this form of warranty. They DO NOT have to. There is no (afaik) guideline within the law about it, that's why different companies offer different lengths (most are offering two years, there are some car manufacturers that offer up till seven years!) and even if they do not have to, you can imagine that this is a huge selling advantage and it can positively affect your decision whether to buy a product or not!

The other form is "Gewährleistung". This type of warranty is provided by the seller of the product (and therefore depends on a certain country/location), for example the store you purchased the product from. This form is determined through laws for a timespan of two years. Sellers have to provide it. And even within this warranty there are differences: if a defect/error appears with the purchased product during the first year, that the seller does not want to compensate for, he has to prove that this defect was caused by faulty/inappropriate user behaviour. During the second year it's vice versa, the customer has to prove that the defect was not caused by false handling, meaning that the malfunction was caused by the product itself, bad assembly, constrution issues etc...

In reality proving such things is not easy, so in most cases there will be some sort of good will from the sellers side, resulting in compensation. And how the seller handles a compensation issue with the manufacturer is often defined by contracts between each other. I worked in a motorbike store a few years, and there were many cases in which the manufacturer came up for costs, even after a longer period of time if it was obvious that the fault was not on the customers side.

For this topic it could mean (not quite sure, can only speak for Germany, maybe EU, for other countries it's different):

In this instance the seller is actually the Play Store. It's not Google, I guess... Therefore the "Gewährleistung" is provided by the Play Store, not Google. Of course, Google is the mother company, but I think that the Play Store in each country is a sub-company, meaning that the German Play Store only has to give you "Gewährleistung" in Germany. Google itself does not provide you the "Garantie" as explained above, since they sell it through the Play Store. We know that the Store belongs to Google (is a part of Google basically) but legally those are two companies, I guess, and this might be the reason why there is no "Garantie" since Google does not need to provide it.

Kinda hard to explain, I'm not a lawyer, but I hope I can clear things up a little bit.

There is actually no need to argue over such things when living on different continents, EU, Non-EU etc. because it just differs between countries ;)