A Jury Will Decide If Google's App Store Is an Unjust Monopoly

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 519 points –
A Jury Will Decide If Google's App Store Is an Unjust Monopoly
wired.com
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What am I missing? You can download other app stores like Aurora or F-Droid do what's the monopoly?

Right? This should be squarely aimed at Apple rather than Google. Google certainly makes it a little difficult, but unlike Apple it's at least possible to do through official features without literally hacking the device.

Epic is suing Google with claims that Google has a monopoly on their App Store. It will likely not be successful.

Epic already sued Apple 2 years ago with an incredibly similar trial. Epic lost that trial, but has filed an appeal, so they may get their day in court again for that one.

The complaint is that epic started allowing its Epic Direct Payment service through Fortnite on mobile. Google and Apple both take a 30% cut from any sales through their App Store. Apple pulled Fortnite from the App Store basically immediately. Google followed suit several hours later.

Epic expressed their intent to sue both companies immediately. They likely were prepared to litigate, knowing the two would not be happy. I do think personally that 30% is a ridiculous amount. Valve also takes a 30% cut from games sold on steam. I think that is criminal for all of these app stores.

I’m not an epic fan, but they only take a 12% cut on their store, so I have to applaud them for that.

Potentially it's targeting google first to set a precedent?

They sued Apple in 2021. They lost. They’ve filed an appeal, and we will see how the court handles this. They announced intent to sue for both companies in 2020. It’s not about third party app stores so much as the 30% cut both companies take on app sales AND in app purchases.

Google enforces the installation of the crappy side bar google feed if you want to ship your phone with Google Play and Gapps

It also includes some other wacky tacky tracking and data collection bs, and some magic legal licensing stupidity that basically lets google control your software packages with what must be installed as system apps.

Google spent the past decade basically ensuring no competitor app store succeeds. No OEM uses Aurora, and only FOSS people use F-Droid. Samsung Shop is also a joke.

Anytime OEMs even try to make an alternative function, Google hangs their Gapps policy over them and prevents them from ever releasing into the market. Most notably affected are most of the Chinese brands which also got slammed by US government bans. "China government surveillance" is not an excuse when gapps literally do the exact same thing.

I think the last phone I ever had that had its own unique android apps and tools was the LeEco Le 2/S3, which came out in 2016. Nowadays, you can't even use allegedly superior RCS without google's crappy Gapps messages app.

It's the other stuff that you are forced to accept if you want access to google play store.

Its not really solely about the play store.

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