- Judge James Donato intends to dismantle Google’s Android app store monopoly, following an earlier ruling declaring it illegal.
- Google argued that opening its store to competitors would be too costly and complex, but the judge dismissed this claim, emphasizing that barriers will be removed.
- Proposed remedies include banning discriminatory practices against rival app stores and setting up a committee to monitor compliance and report regularly.
So, you’ve always been able to sideload apps on Android, Google is just using unfair practices to stop other people’s app stores from being popular.
When does this ruling affect Apple, who actually has a monopoly on their store?
It doesn’t, although Epic simultaneously sued Apple over this in a separate suit. Their arguments against Google and Apple were different, and in the Apple case the judge sided with Apple on practically every count.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
Notably, the one aspect that was not ruled in Apple’s favor was their “anti-steering” policy, which prohibited developers from informing users about different app stores or payment methods within an iOS app. The crux of the ruling boiled down to Apple not having a monopoly over the smartphone market or mobile gaming in general since people can “just” go out and buy an Android device and do business with Google instead (while avoiding mention that Google has near identical policies re: the Play store and takes the same cut of a developer’s revenue).
Needless to say, pretty much every sane person on Earth plus a pretty wide spread of other tech companies can clearly see that the ruling in the Epic v. Apple case was complete bullshit, especially in light of this ruling in the Google one.
The judge was probably an Apple fanboy and/or in their pocket.
The amount of times I’ve heard arguments on Apple forums/news articles being pro-Apple-walled-garden is too high.
Yeah, I was about to say. Was it even SCOTUS? They could have been frugal and bought the judge a mid-sized SUV instead of an RV.
Google is feeling robbed at the moment. I really want the same judge to dismantle Apple’s grip
Just out of curiosity, are you an Apple user, looking for alternatives to Apple’s AppStore?
No. I’m an Android user who wishes for freedom for his (half) brethren who for whatever reason want to use a closed garden
You’ve always been able to side load apps you are correct.
However, this is not what Google wants. Over the years, Google has started to enforce more restrictions on third-party applications. They’ve been slowly making these options more difficult to find in the settings of certain OEMs. Just because they give you the freedom, doesn’t always mean they care.
But yes you are correct that Apples monopoly on their app store is way worse. But Google would absolutely remove more user choice settings if certain things like the GPL didn’t stand in the way of the Android OS.
If Android had never been open-sourced, they would absolutely not have any options for third party installations mark my words.
They only thing standing in their way is Linux and the GPL.
Google is just as malicious as Apple. They are just better at hiding it.
When Google Play services is required from many devices to operate, I’m not sure it matters where you get the apk from
Here’s a comment from yesterday that explains it much better than I could. Quick and dirty tldr is that this has nothing to do with consumer impact, it’s like a business to business thing.
https://lemmy.world/comment/11794585
Side question, is anyone aware of how to properly link comments on lemmy? I know I can link communities with !technology@lemmy.world and users with @borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but I’ve just realized I have no idea how to post instance agnostic links to comments or posts.
As far as I know, there is no way right now. There’s some discussion of having a more agnostic identifier here, but seemingly no movement yet.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987
The best you can get right now is using an extension like Instance Assistant for Lemmy, but that only helps you, not the person you’re responding to.
That said, if you use a mobile app (I use Thunder) it will usually handle post/comment links in-app, so it doesn’t matter what instance they link to.
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Sidenote: those clones, and eventually the entire standard PC architecture we know and love today, were possible because IBM fucked up and used common, off the shelf components, with the only proprietary item being their BIOS, which was quickly reverse-engineered. It’s not like IBM wanted to shower the world in third party PCs that weren’t theirs. That’s why they tried again to lock down the market with the PS/2, but failed to dislodge the PC.
In a different universe, we might all be using Acorn or Amiga today.
Who cares about what you or me like to use? The point is that Google is under fire for their closed system while Apple is far stricter. They should be the first to get forced to open up.
They already got forced in the EU
So if something is shitty, the solution would be to shut up about it and pray that the 40%+ of the world who buys the shitty thing suddenly has an epiphany that they’ve been buying shitty things? Excellent logic.
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