Legally, yes. Dictating the rules for software on your own hardware is entirely legal, and extremely common.
Using your market position to dictate a cabal of other manufacturers’ rules on their hardware is anticompetitive. They’re using their market dominance with the play store to mandate a variety of hardware decisions and software decisions.
That’s incorrect. There are multiple requirements, both hardware and software, to be able to ship with the play store. That’s the monopoly they’re abusing, and that’s what Epic is suing for.
One example (of many) where their requirements have directly impacted the growth of a market is refresh rate. Android ereaders are excellent devices, but because of Google’s arbitrary limitations, devices until recently (when the technology they impeded with their monopoly developed far enough to meet that restriction) were forced to require users to jump through multiple extremely convoluted hoops to enable the play store.
This made them almost entirely inaccessible to normal end users and almost certainly played a huge role in the availability of options. That’s textbook anticompetitive.
It’s not the only restriction, just the first to come to mind.
The play store is their monopoly that they abuse. There’s a refresh rate requirement to distribute your device with the play store.
Otherwise, the user has to go to a Google website page from the device, sign into a Google account, and copy paste serial information of the device in order to be allowed to install the store. That’s not something normal customers can do, and it massively impeded the growth of the Android reader space.
Android is open source and many devices, mostly Chinese products, launch with custom Android builds completely free of Google services. This is not a Google constraint - manufacturers CHOOSE to use Android builds that use Google’s services. Creating your own build simply stops you from integrating Google’s services into the OS, which is actually a PLUS if you ask me.
Even if they WERE requiring it, that would have nothing to do with end user store front installation, which is already something you can do, as shown by the 2 non-Google app stores I have installed on my phone.
Again… I’m not defending Google as some kind of good company here. I’m simply stating there is no way to make an anti-competitivity argument against Google in mobile that doesn’t apply at least as much to Apple. This is a nonsensical double-standard.
“At its core, the operating system is known as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)[5] and is free and open-source software (FOSS) primarily licensed under the Apache License. However, most devices run on the proprietary Android version developed by Google, which ships with additional proprietary closed-source software pre-installed,[6] most notably Google Mobile Services (GMS),[7] which includes core apps such as Google Chrome, the digital distribution platform Google Play, and the associated Google Play Services development platform. Firebase Cloud Messaging is used for push notifications. While AOSP is free, the “Android” name and logo are trademarks of Google, which imposes standards to restrict the use of Android branding by “uncertified” devices outside their ecosystem.[8][9]”
Android itself DOES NOT require ANY concessions of ANY kind to Google.
Android itself DOES NOT require ANY concessions of ANY kind to Google. Maybe “opening the app store” means making Google’s services available without requiring those concessions to Google, in which case, that both makes sense and is a great idea.
Apple isn’t on third party hardware.
They aren’t controlling access to software on other manufacturers devices like Google is.
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Legally, yes. Dictating the rules for software on your own hardware is entirely legal, and extremely common.
Using your market position to dictate a cabal of other manufacturers’ rules on their hardware is anticompetitive. They’re using their market dominance with the play store to mandate a variety of hardware decisions and software decisions.
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That’s incorrect. There are multiple requirements, both hardware and software, to be able to ship with the play store. That’s the monopoly they’re abusing, and that’s what Epic is suing for.
deleted by creator
One example (of many) where their requirements have directly impacted the growth of a market is refresh rate. Android ereaders are excellent devices, but because of Google’s arbitrary limitations, devices until recently (when the technology they impeded with their monopoly developed far enough to meet that restriction) were forced to require users to jump through multiple extremely convoluted hoops to enable the play store.
This made them almost entirely inaccessible to normal end users and almost certainly played a huge role in the availability of options. That’s textbook anticompetitive.
It’s not the only restriction, just the first to come to mind.
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The play store is their monopoly that they abuse. There’s a refresh rate requirement to distribute your device with the play store.
Otherwise, the user has to go to a Google website page from the device, sign into a Google account, and copy paste serial information of the device in order to be allowed to install the store. That’s not something normal customers can do, and it massively impeded the growth of the Android reader space.
That’s not actually true though.
Android is open source and many devices, mostly Chinese products, launch with custom Android builds completely free of Google services. This is not a Google constraint - manufacturers CHOOSE to use Android builds that use Google’s services. Creating your own build simply stops you from integrating Google’s services into the OS, which is actually a PLUS if you ask me.
Even if they WERE requiring it, that would have nothing to do with end user store front installation, which is already something you can do, as shown by the 2 non-Google app stores I have installed on my phone.
Again… I’m not defending Google as some kind of good company here. I’m simply stating there is no way to make an anti-competitivity argument against Google in mobile that doesn’t apply at least as much to Apple. This is a nonsensical double-standard.
Because of their market dominance. That’s what antitrust laws are about.
The fact that it’s not just their own hardware completely changes the legal arguments in play.
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https://source.android.com/license
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)
“At its core, the operating system is known as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)[5] and is free and open-source software (FOSS) primarily licensed under the Apache License. However, most devices run on the proprietary Android version developed by Google, which ships with additional proprietary closed-source software pre-installed,[6] most notably Google Mobile Services (GMS),[7] which includes core apps such as Google Chrome, the digital distribution platform Google Play, and the associated Google Play Services development platform. Firebase Cloud Messaging is used for push notifications. While AOSP is free, the “Android” name and logo are trademarks of Google, which imposes standards to restrict the use of Android branding by “uncertified” devices outside their ecosystem.[8][9]”
Android itself DOES NOT require ANY concessions of ANY kind to Google.
Android itself DOES NOT require ANY concessions of ANY kind to Google. Maybe “opening the app store” means making Google’s services available without requiring those concessions to Google, in which case, that both makes sense and is a great idea.