Huge win for Epic Games in their court case against Google. The court decided that Google’s Play app store operated as an illegal monopoly and the case also challenged the transaction fees of up to 30% that Google imposes on Android app developers.
Fast Key Highlights:
- It’s still unclear what the penalty will be, court won’t rule on this till January
- There’s speculation in the media that this could lead to forcing Google to offer alternative app stores
- Google ironically used privacy measures (self-deleting messages) to hide the anti-competative behavior internally. (see below)
- Epic filed a similar antitrust case against Apple in 2020, but a US judge ruled in favor of Apple in 2021
Very Brief Background: The court case originally began when Epic Games began collecting payments from users directly, bypassing Apple and Google’s steep fees. As backlash, the two companies banned Epic’s apps from their respective app stores. So Epic took it to court. First the Apple ruling went against them, but now the Google one is in their favor.
Why Google but Not Apple? The big difference between the Google case and the Apple one was revenue sharing deals between Google and various other gaming industry participants such as the game developers and even the smartphone makers themselves. Epic’s lawyers were able to clearly demonstrate that “Project Hug”, which involved both direct investment in games and promotional benefits, was designed to shut out competition. This was the key evidence and arguments missing from the Apple case.
Ultimately, the full effects of this ruling are still unclear and most of the internet talk is now just speculation.
Kicker: The judge in the California court case scolded Google during the trial for deleting many internal chats that would have incriminated the company. The ultimate ironic move for a company whose past CEO Eric Schmidt claimed “if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
I don’t understand how they lost against Apple but won against Google - which actually does allow you to download alternative app stores.
It came down to the fact that Google has a lot of deals with different companies giving favourable terms whereas Apple either didn’t do that or was smart enough to hide it
Ahh, that makes sense.
They don’t allow it in their TOS
O, how you can’t have the alternative app stores on the google app store? I mean I suppose.
@soupcat Probably the fact that Google presents Android as an open, level playing field, when in reality it isn’t, whereas Apple is not misleading customers or developers in this case (they just say “fuck you no alternative app stores for you”).
I think that much of the disparity is explained by the fact that the Apple case was decided by a judge but the Google case was decided by a jury, so the people making the decisions had very different perspectives.
Also, because the decisions were so different despite the similarities between them, Google probably actually has a pretty good case it can make in the appeals process, so I wouldn’t consider this outcome to be the final word just yet.