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Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

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Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#571

Post by BlueTemplar »

giantrobot wrote: post #504
throwitaway1123 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps weren't what drove people to the original iPhone (the original iPhone didn't have an app store). Apple was essentially the first mainstream company to commit fully to the current smartphone design — a flat, rectangular, portrait aspect ratio brick, with a single slab of capacitive multi-touch glass. There were many other competing form factors at the time. Apple correctly deduced that touching your screen is the…

They also included WiFi in every model and iOS had transparent prioritization of WiFi over cellular. Apple's deal with Cingular (AT&T) also gave the iPhone plan unlimited data. That meant the iPhone had a full fledged browser that you could actually use. The browsers on PalmOS and Windows Mobile were jokes compared to Safari and most devices didn't have WiFi so we're always stuck on relatively slow cellular. A lot of…

Nokia did pioneer using the smartphone as a decent digital camera (among other things).

For instance decent enough to take a picture of an A4 page and be able to read it afterwards.

And IMAP support.

And Opera mini was a good enough browser, though mostly for text, as indeed 3G cellular (which the first iPhone didn't have) then cost 1000€/Go (funnily enough, that felt cheap and fast at the time, because it indeed was compared to what came before).

(Also video calls, though those are still niche for phones.)

And I hear Nokias were themselves quite primitive compared to what Japan had ?

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#572

Post by BlueTemplar »

carlosjobim wrote: post #160
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If apple literally hadn't won their own case 2 years ago you'd be right. If the company that literally doesn't allow users to install ANY application, yet alone a whole store, is in the clear, it's mind boggling that Google's situation is the one they took issue with. Apple literally has a higher market share in the US.

No matter how much hackers and activists try to redefine the word "monopoly" to mean what it isn't, the word still will have the same meaning. And being a market leader doesn't mean you are a monopoly. Toyota does not have a monopoly on motorized transportation. Having two competing companies being tried for the same monopoly is tragicomic, and only to show how rotten the courts have become.

What do you think it means ?

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

> a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.

Note the "typically", and other courts never even had this rule of thumb to begin with...

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#573

Post by BlueTemplar »

mdwrigh2 wrote: post #451
bugtodiffer wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, most users should have Play Store and nothing else IMO. I respect the Play security team. What I could see: make Play Store and Play Services uninstallable like any other app.

You can disable them, which is functionally uninstalling. Actually being able to uninstall them isn't technically possible because their base images live on a read-only partition so they survive factory reset (which erases all RW partitions). The OS could _pretend_ they're uninstalled, but that seems strictly worse than the existing presentation which more accurately reflects reality.

Not exactly the same situation, but I keep wondering : is deleting personal data only "pretending", since most of it could potentially be restored for quite some time (especially on transistor storage) ?

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#574

Post by BlueTemplar »

samatman wrote: post #560
red1reaper wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really because they are different monopolies. The IOS apps and Android apps are different markets

The reductio ad absurdum of this style of argument would hold that every retailer is a monopoly, because once you walk into the store, you can only buy things from them.

This is more like renting a room in a store than walking into one.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#575

Post by iwishiknewlisp »

fidotron wrote: post #529
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s highly unlikely for Apple to choke on hardware given their cash. And as someone who’s done native for both, Android’s native SDK is a mess that even Android devs actually hate it. Meanwhile, iOS’ SDK is incredibly exhaustive and coherent. I don’t know what your basis is for “better designed software”, but being able to fork a desktop OS from 20 years prior, make it into a mobile OS, then to a tablet OS, then to…

People round here hate this, but it's true. I used to be "the Android guy" at a big games publisher. In my time the billing component had to be rewritten three times solely because of Google changes. The Apple one was written once and left alone. We can't even discuss why those Google changes happened because doing so would get you shot, or worse. The tech direction that was going on at Apple was enormously better th…

[dead]

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#576

Post by johnnyanmac »

elevatedastalt wrote: post #533
johnnyanmac wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

follow the money. Which judges handled which cases in which location? but the non-partisan bailey answer is along the lines of "android promised freedom, IOS never did".

So it's better to be bad than to try to be good and fail?

Based on the legelese here, yea. I guess an equivalent is how you can be a for profit corporation with no issue, but if you're a non profit and you honestly mismanage some $10k as an accounting error, you get the book thrown at you.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#577

Post by al_borland »

Tyr42 wrote: post #465
FridgeSeal wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are devs going to be forced to support all the app stores too? Will they need to go through N separate registrations, N separate support processes? I can see a good number of devs going “eeuuuggghhhhh” and just letting an app rot, just only publishing to one store, rules-be damned, or just going to iOS.

Will devs be forced to make accounts on all the stores in order to collect earnings from sales on that store? Are stores opt in or opt out from a developer pov?

Google can’t force them to use Google for payments anymore. Maybe the multiple stores will force developers to integrate their own payment processing that can be used across all the stores, because it won’t be tied to any of them.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#578

Post by clhodapp »

maxwell wrote: post #479
AceFromOttawa wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there 100's of alternate app stores, all with different revenue sharing agreements, payment processing systems, etc etc etc how are developers going to manage it all? Does a developer need to share their billing info with 100's of app stores? Seperatly agree to each stores terms of service? Seems like it will get awfully complicated awfully quick.

Sounds like a healthy competitive marketplace!

Until Samsung and/or your carrier start locking you into their own app stores, now that it's become practical to do that

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#579

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

What's illegal. 1. Monopoly power plus 2. anti-competitive conduct.

Apple and Google both have #2 but only Google has #1.

"Illegal monopoly" is strange terminology. What does it mean. Monopolies are not illegal. Anti-competitive conduct by a party with monopoly power is illegal.

Re: Google must open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

#580

Post by eru »

int_19h wrote: post #548
acdha wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were the first device with a big display and a first-class web browser. That created the smartphone market you now take for granted but was completely revolutionary at the time when most devices had tiny screens and half their physical size was a keyboard. The other big thing is more subtle: the iPhone was the first major break in the carriers’ value-extraction model. It was common that you’d get phones with hal…

There were high-end WinCE and Symbian devices with large displays and no physical keyboards (or sliders where keyboard doesn't encroach on screen size). To remind, first-gen iPhone was 3.5" @ 320x480 in 2007; for comparison, Dell Axim was 3.7" @ 480x640 in 2005, and by 2007 there were some WinMo handhelds with 480x800. The thing that really made iPhone different was capacitive touchscreen, and the OS designed around…

Yes, the iPhone was nicer to use than what was available in the market the day before it launched.

But the iPhone did _not_ have any first mover advantage. If anything, Apple was late to the party.

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