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Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

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Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#101

Post by mkhpalm »

passivate wrote: post #5
ecf wrote: post #2

My cynical opinion is that it feels Tim Sweeney is purchasing companies in hopes he finds the “right” one that that causes enough public outrage to get his way in regards to App Store cuts.

So far he has lost a ton of cash on lawyer fees, M&A costs, etc. And EPIC now has to individually manage the acquired companies, make sure they're not competing against each other in the same market, etc, etc. I don't think this type of "spending current money to save future money" works. I don't care which company is doing it, but someone needs to break the App Store toll-booth. Apple/Google/Anyone else trying to li…

At this point I feel its fairly obvious that only real solution is a completely new mobile OS.

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#102

Post by GeekyBear »

drusepth wrote: post #99
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google ensures that they are they are frightened away with scary warnings.

This seems necessary and good. There are occasional bad actor apps that slip through Google's app store review process and there are good apps that get sideloaded, but sideloading entails literally zero review. It's entirely up to the user to determine whether they're trustworthy or not, which is a paradigm shift for most who don't think phones could harbor anything worse than just obtrusive ads in apps. There are pl…

> There are occasional bad actor apps that slip through Google's app store review process

It happens on a regular enough basis that consumer tech sites are warning users to be careful of what they install from inside Google's walled garden.

>With malicious apps infiltrating Play on a regular, often weekly, basis, there’s currently little indication the malicious Android app scourge will be abated. That means it’s up to individual end users to steer clear of apps like Joker. The best advice is to be extremely conservative in the apps that get installed in the first place. A good guiding principle is to choose apps that serve a true purpose and, when possible, choose developers who are known entities. Installed apps that haven’t been used in the past month should be removed unless there’s a good reason to keep them around.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/joker...

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#103

Post by saurik »

jollybean wrote: post #96
RC_ITR wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which Google certainly has You’re conflating some ideas here. A marketplace owner always has “dominant market power” over the market they own. That’s the nature of marketplace, the owner gets to set certain rules like the types of payments accepted at the marketplace, because that is literally the job of a marketplace. Google also has dominant market share, since their App Store is the best for android, but that’s l…

"Google also has dominant market share, since their App Store is the best for android, " No, it's preloaded on every device, that's why. If some other App Store, 'App Store B' were preloaded on every device, and App Store were not, then that 'App Store B' would ultimately be 'that much better'. That said - I don't agree with Epic here. If you want your merchandise in Walmart, it's fair that Walmart does the selling a…

These are in-app purchases, right? Imagine if Walmart demanded a 30% cut not of merely the sale price for anything they sold you, but had a policy that any later sale that that product caused--such as an app on a phone, if the phone was purchased for Walmart ;P--had to use Walmart.com's billing and they were entitled to a 30% cut... and then place that ridiculous scenario in a world where half the people in the US only could shop at Walmart and the other half only could shop at Target (and it would cost the user $500 to switch stores and then they would only be able to use the other store). If you want to say that apps shouldn't be free with later purchase, that would at least make more sense? Like, sure: Walmart isn't going to stock and hand out phones for free. But I feel like the honest version of that business makes it so that app developers just pay Apple for hosting fees--which would correlate with downloads, not revenue--which is how all of this really should work.

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#104

Post by heleninboodler »

drusepth wrote: post #100
hamburglar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Require them to give the same dire warnings about apps from their own store, or remove them both.

The difference is that the store includes any amount of heuristic tests meant to scan for malicious activity, and directly installing an APK has no such safety net. You can argue that the testing Google does is bad or minimal, but it seems like the ideal solution would then be "improve the testing". I'd also prefer to see such tests moved on-device so they could apply to APKs from any source, but I don't know how tec…

This puts google in the position of being the arbiter of what testing is "good enough" when they're also one of the supposed competitors. If there's no mechanism by which the other app stores meet the "good enough" bar for testing that would eliminate the dire warnings, then they shouldn't be penalized for not being google.

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#105

Post by stale2002 »

parkingrift wrote: post #67

I’ll side with Epic when they agree to let me sideload skins in Fortnite. Open your platform, Epic!

The difference, of course, being that Google controls ~50 percent of the smartphone OS markets whereas Epic does not control anywhere close to half of the video game market.

Yes, if epic controlled 1 of only two serious video games in the entire world, then yes anti trust law should apply to them.

But that is clearly not the case, whereas Google and Apple clearly are much closer to being anti-competitive.

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#106

Post by lolinder »

colechristensen wrote: post #21
bko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandcamp is using their own billing system, bypassing Google's cut. Every app could do this and cut Google out all together. An app could just let you download the app, pay some amount when you're in the app which would unlock the functionality. I don't think its unreasonable for Google to have a problem with this. They want to get the reach of the app store, and make money off it, without paying a cut to the host li…

That Google’s cut of payments is very high which points to market position abuse

High compared to what? It's the same as Apple's, so you're not comparing to other app stores. Amazon charges the same percentage on Kindle for eBooks.

When people claim that the app store fees are excessively large they're usually comparing to payment processor fees, but neither major app store functions solely as a payment processor. So if not that, what are we comparing to when we say the fee is high?

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#107

Post by drusepth »

heleninboodler wrote: post #104
drusepth wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that the store includes any amount of heuristic tests meant to scan for malicious activity, and directly installing an APK has no such safety net. You can argue that the testing Google does is bad or minimal, but it seems like the ideal solution would then be "improve the testing". I'd also prefer to see such tests moved on-device so they could apply to APKs from any source, but I don't know how tec…

This puts google in the position of being the arbiter of what testing is "good enough" when they're also one of the supposed competitors. If there's no mechanism by which the other app stores meet the "good enough" bar for testing that would eliminate the dire warnings, then they shouldn't be penalized for not being google.

This is pretty par for the course, though. Who else is incentivized to determine what is "good enough" wrt user experience/safety on Google's platform? Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, Samsung, Steam, Amazon, etc are all the arbiters of what's "good enough" (or safe enough) for their respective platforms (and marketplaces) because it's their brand at bat when something _isn't_ good enough (or safe enough).

"Android" (by Google) takes a reputation hit when someone downloads malicious APKs from anywhere, including Google's store. Google, therefore, wants to reduce the availability of bad apps in their ecosystem; maintaining an app store that enforces their standard of quality is one approach to accomplishing this goal, dissuading unknown apps they can't vouch for is another.

Obviously, there are both pros and cons to these approaches (from both Google and the end-user's perspectives), and they could definitely be improved, but they accomplish a concrete goal of "reduce malware on Android".

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#108

Post by withinboredom »

drdeca wrote: post #73
chongli wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far back as the 80’s there were means of distributing software without paying a retailer a commission on every sale. Shareware [1] was one such model. The software was distributed by users copying it from floppy to floppy, handing it out at user group meetings, conferences, even on the school playground. It was later included in large CD-ROM collections packaged with computer magazines. The point is that you could…

I think this might be more compelling if Epic were the ones hosting the download, and Google were just like, listing the download in their listings, where the download button would go to Epic's servers.

And we might ask ourselves: why can’t Google do that? They just need to sign the binary, Google doesn’t have to host it.

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#109

Post by withinboredom »

lolinder wrote: post #106
colechristensen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Google’s cut of payments is very high which points to market position abuse

High compared to what? It's the same as Apple's, so you're not comparing to other app stores. Amazon charges the same percentage on Kindle for eBooks. When people claim that the app store fees are excessively large they're usually comparing to payment processor fees, but neither major app store functions solely as a payment processor. So if not that, what are we comparing to when we say the fee is high?

The fee could be lower. They (the App Store owner) only needs to sign a blob. They (Google/Apple/Amazon) choose to host the blobs, and then charge the developer for it. They claim “marketing” too, but as far as I can tell, that usually involves a sale and the app owner has no choice but to sell their app for less without their consent. I think Apple sometimes has “curated” lists, but it’s questionable how “effective” that is since they don’t release much numbers. What is the ROI of getting randomly chosen to be on that list? Is it worth 30%? We will never know.

Re: Epic is asking a court to stop Google from yanking Bandcamp off the Play Store

#110

Post by zyemuzu »

amelius wrote: post #24
bko wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandcamp is using their own billing system, bypassing Google's cut. Every app could do this and cut Google out all together. An app could just let you download the app, pay some amount when you're in the app which would unlock the functionality. I don't think its unreasonable for Google to have a problem with this. They want to get the reach of the app store, and make money off it, without paying a cut to the host li…

In the 80s and 90s you could buy software running on Windows, where the vendor of the software didn't pay anything to Microsoft; in fact, I'm sure Microsoft was happy with them supporting and increasing the strength of their platform. Why does this have to change now? Why does the platform need a cut?

Not to mention that device makers pay licence fees to Google for the privelege to run the Play Store (and other closed source benefits).
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