1. I think uptake of third party stores is quite low and there’s a strong incentive to stay available on the primary store
2. The App Store model has very much been that the paid apps are subsidizing the free ones. So it’s somewhat fair to charge for using the infrastructure, if you’re not contributing into the pot (and are siphoning away from it)
3. Those per install costs are brutal. I was thinking they’d do a dollar , but at almost $4, they’re outside what most people would spend. This is a strong way to keep F2P games from instituting external payment processing.
But these are likely irrelevant comparisons.
For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open distribution on PCs which essentially means there is no lock in in this industry. And unlike the “web app” comparison folks try to make, open distribution can easily leverage the same capabilities as the store distributed games can (and in fact, they are more capable than games from some stores, like the Windows store).
But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
People depend on these platforms. There are businesses you cannot interact with if not through your phone. There are public transportation systems that are almost unusable.
And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong. General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life. They should be treated differently and we shoudoht allow 2 companies to monopolize and/or embargo them like Apple/Google are trying.
if everything is running on the same couple engines, the cosmetics are all compatible with each other
Asking Fortnite to accept other stores selling Fortnite-compatible cosmetics doesn't work either because Fortnite has not monopolized a trillion-dollar industry, meanwhile spending billions on lobbying to make daily life for the average citizen impossible without them, which the Google-Apple cartel has. Fortnite has also never gained market share by pursuing claims about being an open source platform or not being evil, again unlike Google. These differences.. make all the difference. Call me when my kids are forced to agree to Fortnite EULAs to participate in schooling all around the world.
Unless all around the world is the usual "world === USA".
Not at all. US isn't even the leader on this. For example in many countries it's already much harder to do any kind of digital banking without a Google/Apple-approved phone than in the US.
In Europe as well, more and more places where it's completely the norm for schools and teachers to do all their communication through Facebook or Whatsapp. Sure those have web, but are arguably the worst of the three. Portugal nor most European countries are above this at all. If only they were. Look at all the national IDs rolled out, those too more and more mandatory Apple/Android 2FA.
Will Portuguese teachers never downgrade any students who do all their homework on e.g. OpenOffice and it doesn't look nice on the teacher's MS Office? Doubt it.
Cry me a river for the Epics of the world selling loot boxes and other pay to win crap. It came out in the trial that 90% of App Store revenue is coming from games.
Neither Epic, Google or Apple are on the side of the angels
Either stick to your laws and principles and apply them to everything equally or fuck off
If phones have to be open so should consoles
If the App Store and Google Play have to be open so should the content stores for Fortnite etc. (just like DotA did)
“Epic has indicated that it opposes the service fees that Google announced it may implement in the future and that Epic will challenge these fees if they come into effect.”
https://www.theverge.com/news/848540/google-app-fees-externa...
Unless you are building a gambling game app, it's not worth it to go to the duopoly, I've been there.
Why don't they buy alternate devices without android or google?
- indies who mostly don't care about the 15%
- the huge corpos (Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, game studios) who want the 30% to be 0%. They're the only ones who cares about these disputes. Yawn.
So does this mean a malicious competitor or motivated disgruntled user could fraudulently cause millions of app installs? With the scale smartphone activity fraud farms are at these days, paying a few thousand dollars on such a service to cause a developer to spend a few million dollars on worthless installs (or a lot of resources arguing with Google) seems like a worthwhile endeavour for the motivated.
Meanwhile they get full competitive insight into which apps are being added to Epics store, their download rates apparently, and they even get the APKs to boot, potentially making it easier for those app devs to onboard if they like, and can pressure them to do so by dragging their feet on that review process.
> Provide direct, publicly accessible customer support to end users through readily accessible communication channels.
This is an interesting requirement. I want to see someone provide the same level of support that Google does to see if it draws a ban.
https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/complying-w...
https://www.courthousenews.com/ninth-circuit-confirms-contem...
As far as I can tell, none of this applies to apps installed from elsewhere, be that F-Droid, other stores like RuStore, or just a downloaded apk. As long as the alternative store itself wasn't installed from Google Play that is, but none of them work like that anyway.
I'm not defending Google of course. Their entitlement is still insane.
Charging a reasonable fee for the installation of an app can be, IMO, a fair and reasonably cost-correlative way for app store providers to be compensated for what few services they do provide application developers. That's within an order of magnitude of how much bandwidth would cost, if they were paying market cloud rates, and certainly there are other services rendered, like search indexing.
I would emphasize to the people at Google, however, that your customers bought the phone, which came with the operating system, and thus ethically the core technology your application developers depend on has already been paid for. In Google's case, this happens through Samsung/etc's Android licensing; a relationship which landed them on the wrong side of antitrust lawsuits in the US quicker than Apple's racket did. They dip further by charging developers a direct fee to publish on their stores ($100/year for Apple, $25/one time for Google). Attempting to triple-dip by "reflecting the value provided by Android and Play and support our continued investments across Android and Play" convinces exactly no one of your benign intent; not your investors, nor the US Government, nor consumers, nor developers. The only person who may be convinced that any of this makes any sense is some nameless VP somewhere in some nameless org at your mothership, who can pat themselves on the back and say "at least its legal's problem now". Its possible no one at all in this business unit remembers what the words "produce value" even mean, let alone have the remote understanding of what it takes to do so. Exactly everyone who has ever interacted with it know this; your CEO certainly knows this, given how much investment he's made into AI and not into the Play Store. Continuing to cause so many global legal problems, for such an unpromising, growth-stunted business unit, is not generally a good recipe for keeping your job or saving your people from layoffs.
nsagent•2h ago
dagmx•1h ago
The costs provided here may very well fall into the acceptable boundaries for the courts.
kmeisthax•1h ago
But it seems to me that the court is trying to enforce some kind of middle ground, which doesn't make sense. There's no legal principle one can use to curtail the power of an IP holder aside from mandating it be given away for free. Indeed, the whole idea of IP law is that the true value of the underlying property can only be realized if the property owner has the power of the state to force others to negotiate for it. Apple was told "you can charge for your IP" and said "well all our fee is actually licensing, except for the 3% we pay per transaction". The courts rejected this, so... I mean, what does Apple do now? Keep whittling down the fee until the court finds it reasonable? That can't possibly be good faith compliance (as if Apple has ever complied in good faith lol).
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
You're describing property in general. Not just IP.
> Apple was told "you can charge for your IP"
It's a bit misleading to use quotes in this case, given you aren't quoting the court.
malfist•1h ago
hirsin•40m ago
The four dollars is for providing the platform that the user used to navigate to the link and download the zip file.
That's a fun bit of argument from the owners of Chrome.