Epic is right about this… but these are American companies, and America loves monopolies. No matter how obvious, justified, or cut-and-dry the case against these two companies is, this didn’t work against Apple and it won’t work against Google.
You’re thinking about it from an end user perspective, not from a legal perspective. The court doesn’t care about which platform gives more user choice.
Yes, Apple’s system is objectively more locked down and dictatorial, but Epic lost because Apple effectively said “so what? These are our devices, ergo our rules. You can’t have access to them without our say so.” The courts agreed - Epic can’t compel Apple to allow sideloading on iOS devices, nor free transactions through the app store, in a very similar way to how they obviously can’t compel console makers to have third party game stores or microtransaction systems.
Google is a bit more complicated. Google purports Android to be open (which compared to iOS, it obviously is, but the courts don’t care about that), yet there are restrictions imposed on the OEMs. In effect, Google arguably strongarms OEMs that are reliant on them, which can be argued to be abuse of their market position.
If it turns out that Google blocks, say, Samsung or OnePlus from preinstalling Epic/other app stores, the courts may not like that and may say that Google is abusing the power that they have over these other OEMs (Google telling Android OEMs what they can and can’t do with their own products).
Apple doesn’t have that legal thorn in their side, because they don’t impose rules on other phone makers - their decisions are imposed only on their own devices, and they can do whatever they want with those, as they are their devices.
I’m actually more inclined to believe Epic would win the Google case than the Apple case - courts are always more serious to matters of contracts between companies than they are to what companies are doing on their own devices.
That said, I think Epic will still lose this one too. I just see a lot of people saying they have less chance here than with Apple, and I actually think the opposite.
Add comment