Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes.
So they’re going to ask for that and Google will reply “that has always been possible, look at F-Droid”.
Iirc this is phrased in a slightly misleading way. What they actually want is apps on the play store to be allowed to use their own billing system. And they want to be allowed to offer alternative store apps on the play store.
Android itself or more precise AOSP is open source and of course anyone can do anything with it. This is about what is or isn’t allowed in the context of google app ecosystem that comes with 99.9% of all devices running android.
That makes a bit more sense, however that is very unfair to google, because it allows people to put an app for free on the store and profit on the outside without paying anything to google for providing the infrastructure to host and distribute the app. I wonder if Epic would allow a game that you need to buy from inside the game after installed to be distributed for free in their store, or steam to be distributed through their store.
Well technically it’s still $25 registration fee for the developer. Also, more apps being available on a platform increases the value of that platform, so google benefits even if an app is free. But I get what you are saying.
But this is where the whole monopoly argument comes into play. Just paraphrasing the issue quickly: No app store works even almost as well as play on android. And google is doing that on purpose. First issue is installing the alternative store in the first place. You have to download apks and accept scary warning how this is very very unsafe and you will get hacked and lose all your money and it’s your own fault. Then after that it still does not really work as a store should, you have to manually check for updates and approve every single update individually. Only way to get around that is to unlock bootloader and root, which 99.9% of users can’t and won’t do, and then we have safetynet put in place by google that btw does not check for any actual safety features but only checks if you modified your system, aka tried to escape google hell, and causes all kind of issues.
So in short if Android was a platform where stores and billing systems could compete in a fair way your argument would absolutely make sense. The whole point though is that it’s not, that google made damn sure that the only viable option for any company creating apps for android is to use their store and their ecosystem. Sure, if you ask google of course it’s all just for your safety and surely has nothing to do with them making a shitload of money. The jury decided on exactly that and their verdict is very clear, understandably.
Don’t worry though, there are still decades worth of appeals and other legal moves google can pull off to slow down any potential change. And by the time this case is won by google in 2040 everyone will fully accept this as normal and have already forgotten about the case in the first place. Just like with Microsoft some twenty years ago. Surely they don’t bundle their OS with a browser anymore, right? Wasn’t there a lawsuite?
Long story short I’m pretty sure Google will keep it’s monopoly. They got unlimited amount of money to throw at lawyers and for out-of-court settlements. Epic doesn’t stand a chance, they are on a whole different level.
I mean, I get those warnings though, you are installing a binary that was not reviewed, and of all of the other major OSs, this is essentially impossible on iOS, you get a very similar warning on Windows, and you need to use sudo on Linux, and I’ve never used Mac in any significant capacity, so I don’t think that’s a good argument.
The auto update thing could be a reasonable argument though.
And yeah, I know that realistically nothing will change, but I’m still surprised that Google lawyers couldn’t demonstrate to a jury that they’re not preventing other companies from using their stores in Android and that the security measures are acceptable and an industry standard.
but I’m still surprised that Google lawyers couldn’t demonstrate to a jury that they’re not preventing other companies from using their stores in Android and that the security measures are acceptable and an industry standard.
All the best lawyers in the world can’t get a jury full of idiots to stop being stupid.
The lawyers pick the jury…
They don’t just have an unlimited ability to exclude jurors. Epic also had an interest in making sure people with brains didn’t get seated.
Warnings make sense. Do you really trust the average user to successfully download a proper apk, and do things like check if the site is legit and check sums?
Windows has UAC warnings for outside program installs. Same with Linux once you start installing stuff from outside the repistory.
Epic already have itch.io, Spotify, Discord and more on their store. Each has its own payments system. Microsoft also distributes the Epic launcher via its store.
I don’t care about Epic at all, but this is a good thing in my opinion. These app stores are too influential of a distribution platform in the modern era to be controlled by a single party with total impunity.
If it works like it did with Steam and the Epic Game Store Epic will design a really, really shitty alternative store, then give away free stuff for ages and wonder why nobody wants to use their total piece of crap.
Perhaps we now can get f-droid on the playstore, so people get access to safe and secure apps without ads.
F-droid just has regular apps you find in the play store doesn’t it? Wouldn’t that made it illegal?
No, that’s the likes of apkpure/aptoide.
Then again, as long as the store version comes with clean repositories only, there’s no legal issue. If you then add unknown sources with unknowingly sourced apps it’s up to you
F-Droid builds its own copies of apps, and sometimes strips features that are incompatible with their rules at build time. For example, Firefox on F-Droid is called Fennec because of Mozilla’s rule about how their branding may be distributed.
So at minimum, they are different builds of the same app, but frequently there are actual, tangible differences.
Oh okay got it. I usually pirated and then sometimes bought the apps up front back in the days. Nowadays I only use android for handheld emulation, nothing else.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down.
Mind you, we don’t know what Epic has actually won quite yet — that’s up to Judge James Donato, who’ll decide what the appropriate remedies might be.
Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes.
Both parties will meet with Judge Donato in the second week of January to discuss potential remedies.
Judge Donato has already stated that he will not grant Epic’s additional request for an anti-circumvention provision “just to be sure Google can’t reintroduce the same problems through some alternative creative solution,” as Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein put it on November 28th.
We’ll replace it with the final signed form once we have access to a digital copy.
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great. give rocket league some love now, please.
I loved Rocket League - it’s my 2nd most played game on Steam - but honestly that game died for me the moment they took the irregular shaped maps out of rotation to appease the whiny eSports players.
Now it’s just the same shit every match with a slightly different skin. They’ve got all these different modifiers (gravity, ball size, shape and bounciness) and game modes (hockey, basketball, dropshot), yet none of it gets integrated into the main game.
I’m aware that might just be me, and given how many years it’s been since that change, I imagine most of the user base is perfectly fine with how it is now, but it definitely lost its quirkiness from the early days.
You might enjoy the rocket lab mode. Used to be a limited time mode, but I think it’s permanent now.
Wonder if google’s moves on playtesting req’s - requiring testing teams of 20 or more users - is going to be a way to assert the play store is safe/well curated etc…
either way shit’s gonna get worse for indie devs :|
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