this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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I don't understand. Android already allows other apps and app stores to be installed, and Epic already has an Android app store you can download and install without issue. What was the argument here?
Edit: tldr: apparently it is not good enough for Epic to have their own app store, they want to have their app in Google's app store and still not pay them money for purchases made in the app.
Google paid off other OEMs to make Google Play the default app store (much like they paid off other companies to be the default search engine) which the court decided was anticompetitive.
Phone makers weren’t allowed to include other app stores by default
The Galaxy store app on my phone says otherwise.
The Galaxy Store was a special exception made for Samsung. Generally, Google is pretty "persuasive" about being the only pre-installed app store on the phone.
What's in the contract between Google and Samsung? What exactly are the conditions for including both stores? Can any phone manufacturer get the same deal? What are the requirements for licensing Android? What number of phones on the market don't include Play Store by default? What % of applications are only in Play Store?
Monopoly is not about exceptions but about market control. Until you know what companies have to do to use Android and function on the market you can't really tell if it's monopoly or not.
I have to imagine the contract that Samsung has is "We're Samsung. We basically ARE Korean technology. We can build our own mobile OS if we want to and cut you out entirely. That's a lot of spying on customers you wouldn't get to do. We get our own app store or we walk. Oh look, LG just exited the smart phone market. Do what must be done."
Samsung uses Google's OS (or a fork of it anyway). One of the conditions in the ToS of using that for commercial purposes is that you have to have a certain number of Google apps and services installed and not removable.