Bizarre ruling. There are plenty of other ways to get apps on an Android phone. Amazon even had an App Store for a while.

The case was that Google paid apps to not be on competing stores and only be on the Play store. It’s not a lawsuit around Android sideloading.

Still ironic though that Epic games is the main proponent, but yet they do the exact same thing on their store paying for exclusives.

no doubt china will be making a similar judgement for Tencent etc.

It’s because greed is a one way street to the greedy.

I feel like I would have agreed with Google had they just argued "This is our private store. We did all the work to build it. We control the rules. If you want to make the Epic Store apk, you can. Sideloading is an absolute possibility. No hacking needed."

I would agree with that.

Instead they argued by Epic charging money without giving google a slice, it compromises users safety and the innovation of the platform.

Fuck

Off.

on what? there's a gazillion chinese android app stores already, which makes chinese android phones need a ton more ram to compensate for all the update notification etc. services clogging up the backend

However, the 2023 trial overseen by US District Judge James Donato revealed a pattern of scheming on Google's part to prevent the distribution of alternative app stores on Android phones. While Android devices do allow sideloading of apps, and the platform is open source, Google's scale and partnerships with OEMs made it a de facto monopoly. This led the court to impose extensive remedies that could remake the mobile app ecosystem.

in the linked article on the 2023 trial:

At the time, Google was quick to point out that the ability to sideload apps on Android meant Epic hadn't been completely barred from distributing Fortnite on the platform (as it had been on iOS). "The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple app stores," Google said in 2020. "While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to Google Play."

By April 2020, Epic had returned to the Google Play store, accusing Google of imposing a number of important limits on its sideloaded software. As the company said at the time:

Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third-party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store.

Guys this is huge

ID/age verification for apps is being built so only google signed and integrity verified apps can run, that would prevent any age verified apps running on non-official android OS like graphene.

This will have to change when apps are coming from any random app store and can no longer use these google attestation services

Fuck epic, but good for indie app developers who would otherwise have to hand over blood money to apple and Google

the open Android ecosystem

They got some nerve

But apps outside of their store (such as fdroid) get constantly pinged for malware security scans, and android treats them as second class citizens in a lot of scenarios. It's really frustrating to fight your phone on so many fronts just to use the apps you want.

for banned US app stores like Steam and Google Play.

You say Amazon has one for a while... They're deactivating their apk store like this week, I think.

All the apks I got through amazons store gave a shitty check in them that sees if the Amazon apk store is still installed and active. If it isn't, the apk won't work, so I'm in the middle of waiting to see if the ones I still have installed on my phone are going to keep working or not.

*Edit. Just double checked. Amazon apk store shuts down August 20th.

It’s still a strange ruling to me. It goes on about “monopoly” which Google does not have in the phone space or the App Store space. Other points are talking about “exclusives” and that’s not unique to Google. Does Nintendo sell Mario Kart for Xbox? Pretty sure exclusive releases to a platform are legal.

There’s no monopoly here. No one is forced to sell through the Google App Store or bill through the Google App Store.

From the article:

developers can opt out if they don't want their apps to be available more widely

So it won't affect that.

Still ironic though that Epic games is the main proponent, but yet they do the exact same thing on their store paying for exclusives.

The tactic only becomes illegal when it confers the ability to exclude competitors from the market.

Google has successfully excluded all meaningful competitors from the Android app distribution market. Even big companies like Samsung and Amazon have been unable to operate a profitable app store. Epic is not likely to exclude competitors from the game store market in the near future.

Apple iOS users outside of the EU are familiar with this too.

Amazon apk store shuts down August 20th.

Huh... This sounds like a huge pain in my ass. What happens to Kindle fire tablets, that you know heavily rely on that functionality?

I can guess what happens to any of us that use that store on other devices (I think it's safe to say we're fucked).

I basically only ever used it because it gave away free apps, but man, the DRM put into those apps was so aggressive and annoying.

Real, I actually had to turn off google play protect to install a third party app because of how sensitive it was.