Comment by pas

4 months ago

Sorry, which exact ruling are you referring to? How did the court arrived at this finding (that seems irrelevant, false)?

3 comments

pas

Reply
andyferris  4 months ago

There were parallel anti-competitive behavior cases brought against Apple and Google.

Apple was deemed not to be anticompetitive in app stores because there was no existing market of app stores on iOS. Google was more open in allowing other app stores, but deemed anticompetitive by discouraging their use relative to the Play store.

The irony is the more open player was deemed more anticompetitive. OP is saying Google is “fixing” their anticompetitive behavior by eliminating alternative app stores entirely.

kodebach  4 months ago

It is a non-sensical ruling. But IIRC the reason was basically that while Apple and Google did basically the same shit, only Google kept a written record of their monopolistic behaviour, so only Google was found guilty.

However, there is a relevant court case here. The one about Samsung's "Auto Blocker" (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/samsung-and-epic-gam...). Epic Games sued because Samsung made it too hard to install apps from "untrusted" sources. This may be a reason why Google is now trying to make the process more difficult on the developer side instead.

  • pas  4 months ago

    thanks for replying!

    the Samsung case is very interesting, haven't bumped into that one before.

    ... as far as I understand the really nasty part of "contemporary" jurisprudence of antitrust enforcement is that the standard is to show that things would be cheaper for the consumers

    (though I don't know why developers are not considered consumers of the app marketplace services, after all for them bringing their own payments and whatnot would be much more cost effective... well, anyway, unfortunately the courts are mostly locked to this very inefficient path-dependent way of regulating anything through super expensive arguments, which is an obvious (?) dysfunction of legislation)