Google Loses Epic Games Appeal, Must Open App Store To Rivals (reuters.com) 42
Google lost its appeal Thursday of a judge's order that will force the tech giant to open up its app store to competitors. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling requiring Google Play to allow rival marketplaces and billing systems, ending a legal battle that began when Epic Games sued over anticompetitive practices.
A jury sided with Epic in December 2023, finding Google paid phone makers and app developers to use its store exclusively.
A jury sided with Epic in December 2023, finding Google paid phone makers and app developers to use its store exclusively.
But (Score:1)
Re:But (Score:4)
Separate case I guess. But Apple is a much worst offender. At least on Android you just have to click "allow unknown sources" to install a 3rd party app store. Apple is still blocking that. And no, it's not because of security, it's because of greed.
Re: But (Score:2)
Apple already has this in effect, only in a much worse way, namely because they lied to the court and blatantly ignored injunctions handed down to them. Probably why they got as far as they did to begin with. I still remember Tim Cook downplaying app store revenue, actually testifying in court that he doesn't even know what it is. Smells of total bullshit, but whatever. Ultimately, as the judge stated, every time he made a decision on the injunction, it was always the wrong one, just assuming the court woul
Re:But (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple lost in part, too. That's why they're forced to allow app developers to link to external billing systems now.
I'm not sure why Google is being forced to allow external app stores in their store, but Apple isn't, but there are two obvious differences:
1. Epic didn't ask for their app store to be distributed by Apple in their lawsuit against Apple, but presumably did ask for that in their lawsuit against Google. (I haven't read the latter case, but usually judges don't award a punishment in a civil trial that the plaintiff didn't ask for.)
2. Epic v. Google was a jury trial and Epic v. Apple was a bench trial. Juries tend to be a lot more easily swayed in favor of punishing a big company.
So I suspect it's more about procedural and structural differences between the two cases, rather than any fundamental difference in the situation. But without a judge actually ruling on whether Apple should be required to distribute other app stores, it's anybody's guess.
Re:But (Score:4, Informative)
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One big difference between the two cases was that Google put pressure on OnePlus to kill a deal between them and Epic to include the Epic store out of the box on OnePlus devices, and then offered financial incentives to handset makers to not make similar deals.
It's a difference. Whether it's an important difference is unclear. Google's OS runs on half the market, and so does Apple's. Is having direct control over roughly half the market more or less problematic than exerting influence over half of the market through deal-making? I could see good arguments either way.
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Stop fanboying. They are both bad.
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The question is what precedent is set. Does this case set a precedent that affects Apple? Can a company demand to have their own app store on iDevices and quote this case as precedent? Since it doesn't make sense that Google has to allow them while Apple can refuse to allow them.
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The question is what precedent is set. Does this case set a precedent that affects Apple? Can a company demand to have their own app store on iDevices and quote this case as precedent? Since it doesn't make sense that Google has to allow them while Apple can refuse to allow them.
They can absolutely cite it as a precedent, but whether the judge would agree or not depends on whether the judge considers the circumstances of the case to be similar enough.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's not Apple that Epic is going for. Epic almost certainly wants their store on PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox. Apple and Google are just collateral damage. Those cases will be quite interesting to watch when they happen.
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and only Play Store can do background security updates due to special privileges.
For F-Droid you have to run a Magisk extension on a rooted phone. That's bad for security because most people can't or won't.
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Why not Apple?
WTF are you talking about. Apple lost first. Are you the same idiot who posted this "Why not Google?" in the Apple story a while back?
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Its sad seeing people say they looked something up while regurgitating the Google Gemini response.
No what the AI shat out you way was they lost an attempt to stay the resulting rule from an earlier court case of which Apple lost 3 of the 10 counts against Epic, one of them directly analogous to this case there.
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Again the only loss so far in the us ea/apple cases were relating to anti steering of their payment gateway and their behaviour surrounding the enforcement of said steering. All of thi
the lesser of two evils (Score:3)
Good!
I don't care whether Google's app store is considered a monopoly or not
I don't care whether Epic is doing this for the wrong reasons
the fact is that whenever they lose we (usually) win
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When competition increases, everybody wins. That's worth celebrating.
Re: the lesser of two evils (Score:1)
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Despite capitalism's flaws, it working out better for Americans than any other economic system anywhere else in the world. I'll celebrate that.
Every single income bracket has seen significant increases in average *real* wages (adjusted for inflation) over at least the last 40 years. https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com]
Re: the lesser of two evils (Score:1)
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Congratulations, you have found a potentially better economic system that works for Norway. I say "potentially" because your results come from a model, which could be correct, but models are limited. I'm not sure it's valid to attribute additional life expectancy to the blend of capitalism with heavy regulation, but it's possible.
As for 20 large companies owning everything...that's perception but not reality. Small businesses in the US are thriving. They employ more than half of all American workers, and pr
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Dafuq could be the "wrong reasons" here, pretty please.
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Detractors claim Epic just wanted Google to run the Play Store infrastructure at a loss to increase Epic's profits.
Nobody numerate believes that but they claim Epic did it for that reason which would be shitty except they didn't.
Somebody could probably make a good business out of running a store at 5% markup.
I swear (Score:5, Funny)
Next thing you know, Epic will be pushing to allow people to bring in outside food on airlines and movie theaters.
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You can already bring outside food on airlines.
airlines don't really stop you from airport food (Score:2)
airlines don't really stop you from airport food
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Or even your own food from home or the grocery store.
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Re:I swear (Score:4, Interesting)
All captive markets should crumble. They do nothing beneficial to the consumer.
In this case I think the Play store's "captiveness" is beneficial to the consumer in one important way: Google does a much better job of policing the Play store for malware than most third party app stores do. The extra hoops that users have to jump through to use third party stores do keep most users "captive", but they also keep them fairly safe. The fact that users can easily turn on the ability to sideload other apps or app stores, though, means that they're not really captive. I think this is the right level of friction, though obviously the courts disagreed.
Unless Play can find a way to effectively police malware on third party app stores (which will be hard) they're now going to be required to distribute through Google Play, I predict that this will be pretty bad for Android users. Play could try to put warnings on third party app stores and leave it up to the user to decide, but the courts may not allow that, and it's not really a good solution anyway because when given a choice between security and something they want right now, nearly all users ignore security. I think there needs to be a little more friction than clicking through a warning.
This court ruling is really good for Android malware authors and somewhat good for Epic, but I think it's a net negative for Android users. I hope I'm wrong!
(Disclosure: I work for Google, on Android Platform Security, but not on the anti-malware team. I do below-the-OS security stuff.)
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Google does a much better job of policing the Play store for malware than most third party app stores do
A logical equivalent to your sentence is that some third party app store do a better job than Google. That alone is an argument to allow the third party stores. People are not obliged to use them, but at least they have a choice to have better than Google.
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Google does a much better job of policing the Play store for malware than most third party app stores do
A logical equivalent to your sentence is that some third party app store do a better job than Google. That alone is an argument to allow the third party stores. People are not obliged to use them, but at least they have a choice to have better than Google.
Very, very unlikely -- the resources required to do good malware detection at any sort of scale are enormous -- but also irrelevant. The issue isn't what the best app store does, it's what the worst does. Users who would choose an app store because it does extremely good vetting are users who would be careful what they install regardless of how careful their store is. It's the users who aren't cautious that will be harmed by Google being required to give them access to many app stores.
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F-Droid compiles every app they list from source themselves. I guess you can't get safer than that.
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Stop trying to enslave others because you're too scared to make your own decisions. That's literally the most charitable benefit of the doubt I can give you on this one. Anything else less than that is going to be far more sinister on your part. Even more so if your disclosure is real.......
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I mean, the ultimate way to ensure your protection would be to place you in a padded room with a straight jacket and never let you out. /s
Stop trying to enslave others because you're too scared to make your own decisions. That's literally the most charitable benefit of the doubt I can give you on this one.
Delegating security decisions to users is the best way to ensure that users have no security. I'm all for enabling users who understand what they're doing to make their own choices and are willing to accept the consequences, but the vast, vast majority don't understand security or the consequences of their security decisions, especially not in the face of clever attackers who are quite good at making malware appear completely innocuous. Even a knowledgeable security professional can't reliably distinguish
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Nobody prevents you from only installing stuff from Play. I mean for other software you probably also have a selection of sites you trust and avoid others.
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Nobody prevents you from only installing stuff from Play.
This isn't true for the vast majority of Android users. To a first approximation, all Android users are using devices that have "unknown sources" disabled, so they can only get stuff from Play. Of course, it's trivial to find out how to enable unknown sources and install stuff from other places and I'd expect that nearly all slashdotters who use Android have at least experimented with that, even if they don't use f-droid or whatever on a regular basis. But slashdotters are not remotely a good representat
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You didn't read correctly. I said, that if you think Play is keeping you safe, nobody prevents you from only using *Play*.
If you are prevented to use other stores is a whole different deal. And while you are usually (not sure for all manufacturers) not prevented from using other stores, Google does a few things to make it uncomfortable. Trusting the store is a one-time thing, but you still have to acknowledge every app install twice and updates require confirming you really want to update the app, while Pla
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You didn't read correctly.
I think we're talking past one another. I'll try to be clearer.
I said, that if you think Play is keeping you safe, nobody prevents you from only using *Play*.
Sure, but that's not the point. The point is that Android does prevent most users from using anything other than Play. Not by actually blocking them from using other app stores but by simply not offering the option. And that's a good thing, because most users have no idea how to decide whether or not something is safe.
I think perhaps the confusion here is because you and I are looking at this from different directions. You seem to be look
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My point to some of the earlier posts (and same for all discussions about Apple) is to the people who say "We are only safe if sideloading is impossible," that they are not required to use anything else.
This also has the implication, that if the official store is the only store people (can) trust, publishers will keep publishing there so really nobody is forced to have another store installed.
And the best case scenario is a healthy competition of stores that among other things compete with good moderation.
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You can't bring outside food onto airliners where you live?
I usually bring a sandwich or something on long haul flights, instead of the meals that they offer.
Well,what is good for the goose is good for gander (Score:2)