Google Says Opening Up Its App Store Is Expensive And Too Much Work, Gets Told By Judge, 'We're Going To Tear The Barriers Down' - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
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Judge James Donato plans to dismantle Google's Android app store monopoly following a federal jury's ruling, rejecting Google's claims that opening the store to rivals would be too burdensome and proposing strict oversight to ensure compliance.
  • Judge James Donato intends to dismantle Google’s Android app store monopoly, following an earlier ruling declaring it illegal.
  • Google argued that opening its store to competitors would be too costly and complex, but the judge dismissed this claim, emphasizing that barriers will be removed.
  • Proposed remedies include banning discriminatory practices against rival app stores and setting up a committee to monitor compliance and report regularly.
  • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30910·
    5 months ago

    So, you’ve always been able to sideload apps on Android, Google is just using unfair practices to stop other people’s app stores from being popular.

    When does this ruling affect Apple, who actually has a monopoly on their store?

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      845·
      5 months ago

      It doesn’t, although Epic simultaneously sued Apple over this in a separate suit. Their arguments against Google and Apple were different, and in the Apple case the judge sided with Apple on practically every count.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple

      Notably, the one aspect that was not ruled in Apple’s favor was their “anti-steering” policy, which prohibited developers from informing users about different app stores or payment methods within an iOS app. The crux of the ruling boiled down to Apple not having a monopoly over the smartphone market or mobile gaming in general since people can “just” go out and buy an Android device and do business with Google instead (while avoiding mention that Google has near identical policies re: the Play store and takes the same cut of a developer’s revenue).

      Needless to say, pretty much every sane person on Earth plus a pretty wide spread of other tech companies can clearly see that the ruling in the Epic v. Apple case was complete bullshit, especially in light of this ruling in the Google one.

      • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        324·
        5 months ago

        The judge was probably an Apple fanboy and/or in their pocket.

        The amount of times I’ve heard arguments on Apple forums/news articles being pro-Apple-walled-garden is too high.

        • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          5 months ago

          Yeah, I was about to say. Was it even SCOTUS? They could have been frugal and bought the judge a mid-sized SUV instead of an RV.

        • hemmes@lemmy.worldEnglish
          82·
          5 months ago

          Just out of curiosity, are you an Apple user, looking for alternatives to Apple’s AppStore?

          • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            101·
            5 months ago

            No. I’m an Android user who wishes for freedom for his (half) brethren who for whatever reason want to use a closed garden

    • androidisking@lemmy.worldEnglish
      392·
      5 months ago

      You’ve always been able to side load apps you are correct.

      However, this is not what Google wants. Over the years, Google has started to enforce more restrictions on third-party applications. They’ve been slowly making these options more difficult to find in the settings of certain OEMs. Just because they give you the freedom, doesn’t always mean they care.

      But yes you are correct that Apples monopoly on their app store is way worse. But Google would absolutely remove more user choice settings if certain things like the GPL didn’t stand in the way of the Android OS.

      If Android had never been open-sourced, they would absolutely not have any options for third party installations mark my words.

      They only thing standing in their way is Linux and the GPL.

      Google is just as malicious as Apple. They are just better at hiding it.

      • towerful@programming.devEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        Google is just as malicious as Apple. They are just better at hiding it.

        I feel like they came from a position where that wasn’t immediately transitionable.
        Even tho Apple comes from a BSD background, it seems like Google was more core to the internet and open-source background when they first released Android.
        Since then, they have slowly transitioned all of their captured market to more closed ecosystems. But they have done it slowly out of fear of shedding their more devoted original followers (I dunno how to phrase that).
        These days, I agree that Google is predatory as fuck. In some ways, Google is better than Apple, but Apple is better than Google in others. Neither are clean in regards to user privacy or security.

        I really hope the recent rumblings of a lawsuit against Google regarding OS attestation becomes a real thing and goes through. This would allow things like OS projects like GrapheneOS to provide even better user experience. I would hope that this could then be leveraged against iOS.

        I can’t wait for the plateau where software and hardware is generic enough (well, for phones) that OS and hardware can be actually created by separate projects/companies.

    • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      15·
      5 months ago

      Here’s a comment from yesterday that explains it much better than I could. Quick and dirty tldr is that this has nothing to do with consumer impact, it’s like a business to business thing.

      https://lemmy.world/comment/11794585

      Side question, is anyone aware of how to properly link comments on lemmy? I know I can link communities with !technology@lemmy.world and users with @borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but I’ve just realized I have no idea how to post instance agnostic links to comments or posts.

      • AnActOfCreation@programming.devOPEnglish
        10·
        5 months ago

        is anyone aware of how to properly link comments on lemmy?

        As far as I know, there is no way right now. There’s some discussion of having a more agnostic identifier here, but seemingly no movement yet.

        https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987

        The best you can get right now is using an extension like Instance Assistant for Lemmy, but that only helps you, not the person you’re responding to.

        That said, if you use a mobile app (I use Thunder) it will usually handle post/comment links in-app, so it doesn’t matter what instance they link to.

        • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          5 months ago

          Thanks for confirming my suspicions! I had found that GitHub issue and actually tried the tilde link even though there’s no commits that mention it, just because the bang and at formatting work.

          I do mainly use the Arctic app to interact with lemmy which also handles the url in app fine, but I like to do things the “right” way whenever possible.

        • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          5 months ago

          I’m not sure what your question here is? I wanted to link to this community, since I’m here and it’s just an example. You have to include the instance after the community regardless of your own home instance, so an example for you that isn’t on your home instance would be !cybersecurity@sh.itjust.works.

          If all you see is what you typed, maybe your app is being weird because you and this community are on the same instance? If that’s the case I typed !technology@lemmy.world.

    • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      When Google Play services is required from many devices to operate, I’m not sure it matters where you get the apk from