Google faces new anti-competitive reviews and, unsurprisingly, it’s all about the Play Store

[ad_1]

Epic Games and Google have been vying for the lead for over a year at this point, and their fight is over how developers sell apps (and make money) on Android. Now, a court order this week just released freshly unredacted documents in the ongoing Epic v. Google, publicly revealing some of the apparently anti-competitive actions Google was taking in order to – using the language of the antitrust complaint itself – limit “competitive contagion” and keep the Play Store flourishing. (Well, according to Epic, at least.) And to hear those accusations, Google has gone to great lengths to both get developers to use the Play Store (and support Google slashing revenue by 30%) and phone makers have invested in the Google ecosystem.

There are several important takeaways from Epic’s complaint. One of them is the reveal of the Premier Device Program (as reported by The Verge), which Google apparently launched in 2019 and which aimed to offer phone makers incentives to ship their devices with apps and services. Google. One of the requirements for these Premier devices was that they could not include “apps with APK install rights” other than those from Google.

In short, this seems to discourage OEMs from selling phones that come with app stores that aren’t the Google Play Store. But that definition also includes things like the Fortnite Launcher app that was used to install the game from outside of the Play Store. And in return for that, Google was offering compliant OEMs various financial incentives, such as an additional 4% of the search revenue generated by the covered devices, as well as monthly bonuses and a 3-6% “gaming expense” bonus for some. OEM. .

Fortnite continues to be the bane of Google’s existence.

According to the document, companies fully integrated into the Premier program include HMD Global (Nokia), LG (RIP) and Motorola, as well as Xiaomi, Sony, Sharp and some BBK properties (like OPPO, Vivio, OnePlus and Realme) to a lesser degree. . We are also getting confirmation that it was the Premier Device program that prevented OnePlus from preinstalling the Epic Games Store on their phones.

Another tantalizing new detail concerns how Google has also tried to stop game developers from going the Fortnite route of distributing their games outside of the Play Store. The initiative was called Project Hug (also known as the Games Velocity Program), and it aimed to “bring more love / promotion to the best developers and games”. The effort, according to the document, involved making secret, multi-million dollar deals with more than 20 top developers who were most at risk of “Play attrition.” Basically, Google didn’t want them to take a page from Epic Games and distribute apps and games to users outside of the Play Store.

If Google was successful, would we ever see phones with alternative stores like Samsung’s?

The document does not go into detail on what kind of incentives these developers were receiving, but that plan was reportedly presented alongside Project Banyan, a strategy apparently aimed at buying out Samsung’s Galaxy Store.

This was unsuccessful, but was replaced by something called Project Agave, a “more surgical” deal in which Samsung would offer certain protections to Google Play in return for sharing the revenue from in-app purchases provided by Google. This would also include revenue from “browsers and assistants”, presumably speaking of Chrome and the Google Assistant.

There is a lot to deal with here, but if we can take a TL out of it; DR would be that basically Google seems to have used large sums of money to influence phone makers and game developers to stay invested in the Play Store. while undermining its competition. If you want to draw your own conclusions, you can read the document here.

[ad_2]