Why do hardware manufacturers need to pay a certain patent licensing fee to Microsoft? Google Android phones including HTC.

Look at things carefully:

"This is because Microsoft sued HTC, a handheld device manufacturer in Taiwan Province Province, for infringing Microsoft's patent intellectual property rights."

"The Android operating system is open source, which means it is free. HTC was also sued by Apple, which claimed that HTC infringed the relevant patents of the company's iPhone smartphone, and Google, which owns the Android platform, was also sued by Oracle Bone Inscriptions, who believed that Google copied Oracle Bone Inscriptions's Java code in the Android source code. "

That is to say, I stole from others and didn't give money ~ ~