Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
Show of hands if you had this on your bingo card: This week, Fortnite creator Epic Games WON their case against Google that restricted developers to exclusively use Google’s App Store. This is the same case that they essentially lost against Apple earlier in the year.
In short, Google was found guilty of abusing their monopoly position by bribing phone makers into not allowing the Epic Game Store onto devices, and threatening to revoke the Google Services cert if they did. Additionally they bribed other major dev houses such as Riot and Activision to not develop App Stores of their own in the first place. Why this case took 3 years to resolve is absolutely beyond me.
Apple got around this because of the way iOS is built; other App Stores are basically impossible. Android is designed to be more open, with sideloading being a relatively easy process that doesn’t require rooting a device. Apple got away with a gross technicality, for sure, but a legal one. Google abusing their monopolistic position via intimidation and payoffs… not legal. At least according to this ruling.
Google will of course appeal, because as we all know, behaving with fairness and decency towards consumers and partners is not in the shareholders best interest. Won’t somebody think of the shareholders?!?!