Judge orders Google to calculate the costs of Epic’s biggest Play Store demand
Judge orders Google to calculate the costs of Epic’s biggest Play Store demand
Google has a month to figure out the cost of compliance.
So Epic Games have 10 demans from Google. One of this demands is to allow third party stores to access applications that are hosted on Google Play Store:
If a Third-Party App Store's User wishes to download and install an app not then available on that Third-Party App Store, Google shall have the Google Play Store download and install that app on the Third-Party App Store User's device through a background process similar to the Alley Oop integration offered by Google to certain third-party Developers.
And the judge ordered Google to calculate the costs of developing such mechanism which will basically allow third party stores to list applications from Google Play Store in their own stores.
Google will file by June 24, 2024, a proffer stating in detail the tech work required and economic costs, if any, to provide “Catalog Access” and “Library Porting” to competing app stores for a period of up to 6 years. See MDL Dkt. No. 952 at 7. The proffer may also address tech work and economic costs for the distribution of third-party app stores through the Google Play Store.
I find that a silly demand. What's the point of a third party app store if it depends on play store to install apps? Host the apps yourself
It blows my mind how differently the courts are responding to Epic vs. Apple and Epic vs. Google.
Ironically Google's biggest argument against this is that it's privacy invading because said 3rd party app store will have to know what you have installed on your device.
They clearly don't care too much about that privacy leak or it would have taken them less than 13 years to fix it in the first place (yes really).
It's that you don't have to keep the play store app on your phone if you want to minimize google's presence on it. Maybe this way you also don't need to accept the ToS to be able to download those apps, but not sure about that one.
But you do need to have play store installed if the epic app store needs it to function
A mechanism which will basically allow third party stores to list applications from Google Play Store in their own stores.
Doesn't Aurora already do this?
Aurora is just a frontend for Google play so I guess that depends on your interpretation
Seems like a distinction without a difference.
If I can install an app via APK Mirror, and have it listed in Aurora as a Play Store app, then the functionality already exists.
This is a symptom of once again, Epic doing the bare fucking minimum and expecting to play with the big boys (but they can't unless they cry to an adult).
Epic feels they're entitled to have Google offer them services, which is so on brand at this point, I don't know why I'm surprised.
They complain about monopolies but lock games behind exclusivity rights and break communities apart with patches which change the matchmaking formulas which worked until they fucked with it (Rocket League and Payday 2).
God damn I hate Epic. They're worse than EA, which says a lot.
With some success, yes, by using fake google accounts to have access.
Whatever hurts Google, I'm down. Fuck them. They should be broken up. Google Search should be its own company and so should Youtube, Google Cloud, Gmail, and so many other things.
Lmao that anti commercial AI license is like the zoomer equivalent of those Facebook chain messages where you repost a legalese paragraph about how Facebook can't use your data. Cracks me up every time I see it
Except that's it's not annoying, or only very mildly so, and in the future it may be effective. I don't use it, but I'm all for poisoning datasets that were made without any kind of permission from the creator whatsoever.
Good
Very good