This is so wild. Google allows side loading and 3rd party app stores…and that is the reason they were found guilty.
Unlike Apple, Google allows people to download apps onto phones running its Android operating system without going through its official app store, but the company strikes deals with phone manufacturers to favor Google’s official app store.
So because they strike deals to favor their store, even though they allow 3rd party stores to begin with, they’ve violated the SAA.
Meanwhile, Apple who refuses to allow competition or 3rd party app stores is sitting pretty because…well, they haven’t “favored” their own store over rival stores. BECAUSE RIVAL STORES CANT EXIST. I don’t know how you could favor your store any harder than that??
The legal shenanigans around all of this are frustrating to watch as a lay person.
I run e/OS, I don’t have google app store or any of the related service software installed. Yet I am able to use a cleaned up version of android and still have access to the google app store through an anonymous account using the in built app.
Epic won this case against google…
Epic lost the same case against apple, with which none of the above would be possible.
I’m not advocating for google, obviously I avoid them. But that’s BS, I hope this is used as precedent to bring a new case against apple.
Seriously this is crazy. Apple somehow winning is way worse as there is simply no way to install third party apps on IOS. Android makes the risks clear but it’s still at least possible if you click install anyway.
In terms of being a monopoly, in the US ios has more market share anyway. Google’s lawyers must have really made some big mistake.
oh no google!! it’s not illegal because first of all, epic games dislikes linux because they don’t code anything for it, second, google is open source. the jury was very biased, that’s very bad
My interpretation of the article is that it wasn’t Google’s app store but the deals Google did with other manufacturers and big studios that caused them problems. Unlike iOS Android has both open source and commercial forks. Amazon have their own app store for their own range of devices and you can load that app store on regular Android I believe if you want to access a shittier range of apps. There are degoogled versions of Android and many people including myself run f-droid or side load apks. It is much more open than Apple’s system which won.
Lol scrolling the front page of that is just like a bunch of whataboutism and hypothetical stretches about how things might be and people hating on fortnite for being fortnite. I’m open to real reasons but I’m not reading more than a dozen fluff nonsense opinions to get to them.
Where? Like, no. Maybe they somewhat support software they have in the chain of usage like any other company and that’s it. Yes for taking the challenge, but like Spotify, complaining about roadblock of another company, does not make them good.
But not to say this should be the place to trash on Epic.
Finally a big W. Google backdoored Android with Google Play Services and gives itself special permissions that no other app can do. They should be under the same limitations that other apps are reserved to. That’s why projects like Sandboxed Google play is really awesome.
While I understand the concern over the single appstore monopoly that we have on any device, I think it’s worth remembering what ecosystem android and IOS came into.
The old multimedia phones that were sold in the mid 00s were effectively “smart”. Many of them ran java and you could install programs, and freely install ringtones, and browsers that actually worked like opera mini/mobile. The thing is you couldnt by default. At least not in the US. The devices were locked down and everything you did went through the carrier’s store. And US telecom services are some of the greediest and scummiest companies out there so you couldnt even use your own mp3 files as a ringtone.
Apple combated this with their closed off ecosystem, but android did face issues with fragmentation in the early days and needed a way to prevent the telecoms branded phones from stinking up the ecosystem. They did this by leveraging the play services and play store. From the playstore they can also since mainline release various peacemeal updates which helps resolve their other issue with fragmentation and thats android device being abandoned.
Sure enough you can still release your own version of android without it, amazon’s tablets and tv sticks do pretty well.
That said I do think it’s a good to help people move past the default and open up the platforms more, I just wish it would apply to all smart devices,
The ecosystem Android and iOS came into was that smartphones were tiny computers where you could install programs from anywhere. Just like any other computer.
What they did instead was force all programs to go through one source. Apple especially did not just helpfully provide one reliably safe path to acquire software… they viciously prevent all other means of getting programs on your phone, to this day. Android’s a bit better, but in practice, Google’s store is all that matters, and Google’s store acts just as greedy and demanding as Apple’s tightfisted enforced monopoly. You cannot release an Android device with Google’s store and your store.
The first iPhone did not support external software, period. No less than John Carmack gave Steve Jobs shit for this. Steve insisted “web apps” would suffice, in an era where the video tag barely existed, Javascript was still a hideously slow interpreted language, and everything cool in a browser relied on the Flash plugin that iOS would never support. I don’t know if going from that to ‘we censor everything and you have no choice, give us 30%!’ was a deliberate move to make people want the leash… but it wouldn’t be the first happy accident where Jobs fell ass-backwards into a billion dollars.
Meanwhile, over on PC, anyone can install anything from anywhere, but Steam has the same absurd 30% cut and a clear de-facto monopoly. Everyone else is either managing their own games with no store… or trying to compete with Steam and finding zero traction. When Epic of all companies, an absolute giant with billions of dollars in basically passive revenue, can’t suck off developers and customers hard enough to draw people away from Steam, that is a sign that this style of software repository has immense control, by nature.
You’re describing higher-end feature phones. The ecosystem Android and iOS came into was that smartphones were tiny computers where you could install programs from anywhere. Just like any other computer.
This is true but those OG smartphones, at least in the US, targeted enterprise business and IT users. What really caused iphone and later android to change the marketspace(other than just right place and the right time for 3g and edge technology) was that they targetted that space that feature phones occupied and hit mainstream consumers. And phones like the sidekick and motorolla razr were technically capable of being smart devices they were just kept back from it because the telecoms didnt want it. In the earlier days the android ecosystem was a bit of a mess and we already have lots of preinstalled apps from telecoms.
Sure there would likely still be higher end (and priced) android devices that would be vanilla or unlocked clean versions, but there would definitely have been a world where there was the verizon app store, T-mobile app store, sprint app store, att store, and of course epic app store, Dont get me wrong a more open platform is nice and Im not saying the monopoly as it stands is a good thing, but other side of history would have been just as bad. And of course android’s branding would be on the locked down devices which would be a problem for google.
As an aside having a primary source for programs to be installed to isnt inherently a bad thing. For example Im a linux user and much prefer the system of installing programs from my distro’s repo, or if it doesnt exist checking flathub’s repo or adding a third party repo and then after all that getting the rpm or deb.
Regarding the iphone, you’re right about that. Everyone remembers the buzz around the iphone launch and the 3gs. They forget about the 2g only web browser only device that first came out. It’s funny people often like to post and make fun of old quotes from the contemporary competition and laugh, but they werent entirely wrong especially with that first model. And the “real internet” as they called it was not as big a strength one might think without a mouse or access to flash in 2007.
Apple had a huge amount of momentum from the ipod and their marketing campaigns were doing a lot to change their perception and win over more and more users. They targeted the masses and mainstream instead of businesses and it worked.
And phones like the sidekick and motorolla razr were technically capable of being smart devices they were just kept back from it because the telecoms didnt want it.
And then Jobs forced through a phone with no telecom rot, and it did even less.
In the earlier days the android ecosystem was a bit of a mess and we already have lots of preinstalled apps from telecoms.
As opposed to when?
Sure there would likely still be higher end (and priced) android devices that would be vanilla or unlocked clean versions
… as opposed to when?
“The other side of history” here is if you could buy phone-OS software at Walmart. Like… any other software, at the time. All “app stores” are bad, actually. All of them are some form of single-vendor walled garden, and their goal is to keep people in so they can keep seeking rent on other people’s software.
Chances are high that everyone in this Lemmy thread is a Linux user, and all of us know that getting software from outside your repository of choice comes with a sense of misery. Money’s not what makes it a problem. Any system designed to be a one-stop solution is not designed for competition. No matter how open it is. Windows, for its innumerable faults, will happily run whatever garbage you got from a brick-and-mortar store, or a skeezy website, or through some networked installer installer installer. make && configure is a prayer. But I can grab any install wizard off a 1990s PC Gamer disc and have better odds it’ll install under Wine.
Android came so close to the right idea, with APKs. Platform-agnostic bytecode with permission-based APIs? Even today, that’s a fantastic goal. And lusers don’t need to know how it works if they just click Okay and watch the progress bar fill up. What we have instead is an ARM monoculture where the allegedly open and free vendor considered locking everything down or buying out another billion-dollar corporation to avoid tolerating software outside their ecosystem.
The most bitter irony is, browsers became the right answer. WebGPU’s gonna do Vulkan things. WASM has probably sorted out its threading. It’s not exactly SPIR-V and Qt, but it’s a thin enough overhead that you might as well ship one version everywhere.
Yup. I was part of Verizon’s app development program and it was a fucking joke. Even if the dev tools and build chain wasn’t a complete mess, and even if the dev license wasn’t expensive, and even if it wasn’t almost impossible to even get test hardware… Even if you managed to build something more useful than snake, you’d still have to wait months and months and months for Verizon to sign your apps and then months more before they’d be available on any handset. I’m legitimately not sure it was even possible for a small dev to get anything approved.
Open app stores were and still are amazing. I get that people want even more freedom, but coming from the trauma of feature phone development, I find it hard to get upset about this, especially considering Android makes it dead simple to sideload.
About the only benefit I can personally see from this is the ability to fully integrate F-Droid as an app store in my device, with proper automatic background updates, and without requiring root solutions that void my work’s security measures for mobile devices. On the other hand, I can see Huawei, Amazon, and Epic jumping to the fray with their own app stores and system services, and maybe Google Play being far more lenient with subscription services like Spotify’s in their own App Store. Altogether, I personally loathe Epic’s approach, but appreciate the consequences of their lawsuit.
Amazon still has its own app store open - mostly because it’s the one Microsoft used as the base for their Android compatibility layer. I expect this ruling to give Amazon a breath of fresh air as “the alternative app store”.
This may force Google to address their terrible dispute resolution policies though. If they keep removing software without providing any meaningful dispute resolution, then I would hope that there’s a possibility for alternate repositories to fill that void.
Increased competition is ALWAYS better for the customer.
You’re forgetting AppBrain from like 15 years ago.
I agree on the concerns, but it’s a virtually universal truth, so long as they’re actually forced to treat other app stores fairly. We might end up with a true third party stepping in to claim the throne, at least until the mega-corps reverse all the optimization they’ve created for their own benefits (even things like searches for apps are not fully intended to benefit the user right now, things most people don’t really realize).
Problem is, ADB requires enabling developer mode, and guess what - my company also blocks access to devices with developer mode on! (Also, the fact that Shizuku doesn’t work correctly over mobile because it requires stable Wi-Fi to fake a wireless debug connection doesn’t help matters.)
Shizuku only requires WiFi once per boot. But it also needs ADB, so it sadly won’t work for your company phone.
I think the Session Installer mode allows updates without a dialog for apps already installed by Droidify without dev mode or adb.
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
This seems like a poor choice instead of monetary damages. I have the Epic Games Launcher free game downloader for games I forget I own. I’m very unlikely to start using Epic’s services over Google’s.
This whole thing stinks. It’s the kind of lawsuit where you wish both parties could lose. The whole walled garden concept sucks, but this doesn’t exactly benefit consumers. Nobody wants a dozen different app stores where we need to set up accounts and payment info - not consumers and not small to medium size developers.
If Epic gets what they’re asking for it sure as hell won’t be what they want. Google still controls the OS so they can just make some shitty third party app store API with requirements just as onerous as IAP that puts everyone else at a disadvantage. If I’m Google, my new motto is “Android’s not done until Fortnite won’t run”.
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