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How is Google Play, which is easily circumnavigated with things like F-Droid and APKs, considered a monopoly and the Apple app store isn’t?
The Apple case was decided by a judge and this by a jury, which makes a big difference
How exactly does a jury trial work in a case like this? Aren’t juries supposed to be “peers” of the accused? How can a corporation be tried by a jury of its peers?
In the US, corporations are people
Yeah but who are their peers?
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At least in the EU Apple app store is considered a monopoly, and Apple is expected to allow third party stores during next year.
I’m curious how they manage a function like this differently between EU and the rest of the world.
iOS 18.1 and iOS 18.1-EU?
GPS, mobile network tracking, IP, region the device is sold in (us iphones have a block of plastic where everyone else has a sim card slot), apple store region.
Lot of possibilities
Possible solution are EU exports to the US then.
Also VPN, fake apple store region. If detected during download/install also RF-shielding to prevent GPS and mobile network (if download, also needs a wifi signal inside the shield to download at all).
Lot of workarounds for lot of possible detections.
From what i read about it, Apple has a walled garden but charges a flat fee for everyone and has no special deals. Everyone pays the same and they make a little money off of the store but also the hardware sold.
Whereas Google has been caught treating certain parties differently, such as Spotify, something called Project Hug, where they gave extra benefits to parties at risk of leaving the play store, among other unequal dealings.
So the crux of the question is not about the monopoly itself, but the fact that Google is treating market players differently and throwing its weight around to influence the market to its advantage.
has no special deals.
Spotify and Netflix technically have no special deal but bypass the fee and are not kicked. I would argue favoritism is like a special deal.
Basically Android makes deals with big companies, Apple charges flat rate for everyone
Because 90+% of people don’t know what fdroid is and can’t get many of the apps they need there.
Okay but just the existence of APKs and sideloading means options exist. That doesn’t make a monopoly in my mind
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That doesn’t answer the question. Sure, in isolation, Android app ecosystem isn’t ideal. But it’s so so much better at allowing competition than the apple one.
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I assume because no one downloads other app stores
You are off-topic. We are talking about in-app purchases percentage rates
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.
The original article contains 492 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I get the hate on Google. I use a degoogled phone and got rid of google everywhere else. But I am not a fan of this. Its their store. Imagine a goverment comes to your own grocery store that you built and tells you whose products to put where and how much to charge for them. Instead of trying to build an alternative to compete with Play Store we will give more power to goverments. Thats not good.
If your grocery store “willfully acquired or maintained monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive conduct”… then you’d be actively and purposefully affecting the ability for anyone to “try to build an alternative to compete with [it]”.
They aren’t asking Google to use a specific price, what they are asking is for them to stop offering special custom-made deals under the table for some of the partners with the intent of preventing competition. Nobody is stopping Google from offering the same fees to everyone indiscriminately… the issue is when they pick and choose with the purpose of minimizing/discouraging competition. Particularly when they are already the biggest one in their market by a wide margin, so they have a higher power/responsibility than a Mom’n’Pop store.
You really need to read the article, and specifically the linked article within that details the court proceedings. Anticompetitive behavior is illegal, and Google did lots of it, and did so blatantly, and deleted evidence of doing so.
The 30% they charge isn’t the issue. The issue is the anticompetitive actions they took to keep themselves from ever having to charge less than 30%.
If that were all this was, sure. In your analogy though, Google owns 95% of the grocery stores and has deals with 90% of the food vendors that if they allow you to stock their brands they lose access to sell in the Google grocery store. That practice is anticompetitive, because it functionally prevents you from opening your own store to compete.
yeah this is terrible. what is curious to me is why those 90% of vendors do not come up with an alternative. they are the ones who make the playstore what it is, if they pull out, that store is finished. Huawei has their gallery, maybe it will start with fragmented stores and consolidate later. it would be nice to see some kind of open marketplace like fdroid to be developed also for non FOSS apps to be introduced as an alternative. i am sure whatever is better for all parties involved will eventually win.
Most of those 90% of vendors are not big enough to pull it off. The ones with the muscle to do it successfully are apparently offered special deals by Google that make it not really worth it for them to spend the effort to try and invest in building their own store. Specially if doing so compromises that deal.
Add to that the technical hurdles of trying to run a store in an OS managed by the competition and with increasingly tight security restrictions for functionality that is considered “system level” (eg. automatic updates on F-droid don’t work unless you root/flash the firmware…), to the point that you need to make your own OS/firmware if you want to be a real alternative with the same level of user friendliness.
Then add the technical hurdles of installing/managing an alternative firmware for several phone models, to the point that it might be easier to become (or partner with) a phone manufacturer.
Then add to that how competitive and ruthless the phone manufacturing market is, with very thin margins, and how reluctant people are to trying something that isn’t already mainstream and doesn’t have the fancy apps from the remaining 10% of successful big companies in the Play Store.
A giant as big as Amazon tried to pull it off at a few of those levels (from running their own installable store on regular Android to making their own devices with their own firmware) and even with all the pull from Amazon it isn’t making much of a dent. And in some of the device categories (like the fire phones) they already gave up.
Problem is that it not really is “just a store”. By using the google store you get access to the google play APIs, which are upgraded separately from the device OS - which is sensible from a security perspective, but they also were created by google specifically for regaining control over what goes on on Android devices.
A lot of applications are needlessly tied to play APIs - either because that way is a bit easier, or just because google is good at marketing them, and the developer didn’t think twice about it. Some relatively basic APIs are part of google play - for example maps, which needlessly is tied to google maps. Unlike Android itself the play APIs are not opensource.
Yandex tried about a decade ago to re-implement the play APIs to keep such applications working without the play store, by utilizing other services providing the same functionality, and tried to get other companies to join them. I’ve visited the Yandex office in Saint Petersburg a few times to discuss that back then (just checked, most of that seems to have been 2014 - that year Yandex was sponsoring my Russian visa). The effort failed for various reasons, unfortunately - the big one being that doing this required reverse engineering API changes on every play update google was pushing to stay compatible. There’s the microG project around now, but it seems to be less ambitious than what Yandex was trying to do back then.
My point is, as long as at least the API for play services isn’t maintained in a way that allows full open source reimplementations - or better, google releases parts as open source where we can plug different backends in - “use a different store” is not really a possible solution for many.
This is further crippled by how the increasingly tight security measures in Android make harder and harder to add functionality that is considered “system-level” and is as deeply integrated as the Play Store.
You can’t simply install F-droid and expect the same level of user friendliness and automatic app updates as in the official Play Store. Without esoteric, hackish and warranty-voiding rooting methods, you need to give manual user confirmation for every small update. You need to update 30 apps that accumulated because you forgot to manually update each of them? get prepared for going 30 times thought the same process of pressing buttons and giving confirmation for each of them.
Yeah, things are getting to the point where just having a mobile device running Linux and using Waydroid for some useful Android applications is less painful than trying to make Android work.
I am using /e/OS/ and their App Lounge does the updates automatically, unlike Aurora Store/Fdroid, so it seems possible
You’ve replaced the whole operating system - in which case they obviously are in control. It is equivalent to a rooted stock Android device.
But if you just install their app installer on a stock Android device you’ll have the same problems.
its terrible we are dependant to this point on one company
