Android is Google’s open-source mobile operating system; think of it like a public park compared to Apple’s walled garden. It dates back to 2007, and though its dessert-inspired version names were retired in 2019 for a straightforward numbering system, there will always be a special place in our hearts for an OS called “Oreo” and “Ice Cream Sandwich.
It’s a minimal update. Google didn’t bring many Pixel 10 features down to the Pixel 10A this year. Buy the berry color.
You’ve been able to add them via desktop for decades, and even iPhone users had the option, but finally Android is catching up. You still can’t customize the colors from your phone, but maybe we’ll get that in another ten years or so.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, that is, re: the Nvidia Shield TV, likely the most supported Android gadget ever at over a decade. Nvidia’s Andrew Bell tells Ars Technica a new model isn’t in active development, but hints at what he’d add (like AV1 and YouTube HDR). He says Nvidia doesn’t profit off its Netflix button, BTW.
Google says you can now use the AI chatbot to ask questions while using walking or cycling directions in Google Maps, which already worked for driving directions.
When you’re exploring around town and navigating with Maps, Gemini can be your personal walking tour guide. Just ask, “OK Google, what neighborhood am I in?” If you’re hungry, follow up with “What are top-rated restaurants nearby?” and Gemini will recommend delicious options along your route based on Maps’ fresh, comprehensive information about the real world.
Update: Google’s blog post says it’s rolling out now on both iOS and Android.
And we’re done! Lawyers for Epic and Google have asked for a few weeks to talk amongst themselves and file one more brief by early March. Judge Donato says yes “just so long as we are clearly duel-tracked and the order is going forward.” He wanted to be sure Google is actually complying, and Google says it is. Epic says the court-ordered technical committee, where Google and Epic must hammer out the details of store-within-a-store and catalog access, is up and running too.
Sweeney, earlier today: “Every store will be able to do a much better job of serving US users if it can reach a worldwide audience.”
Epic’s lead attorney has continued to push on that with Dr. Rose, who says she was not assigned or resourced to explore “all of the fundamental economic issues,” but admits she doesn’t know if other app makers would think the whole world is as important to their business as Sweeney suggests Epic does. (Again, the Epic Google proposed settlement would change things globally, but the current injunction only applies in the US, while Epic and Google continue to fight elsewhere in the world.)
He tried a few other questions with Dr. Rose as well, but I didn’t catch anything particularly interesting. She has now stepped down, and we’re going into Epic and Google’s logistics for the next steps going forward, presumably before the judge gives us his final thoughts for the day.
When we return from the short break, Epic’s lead attorney gets to ask Dr. Rose more questions, and the judge has asked he doesn’t use that time to come up with “800 more.” Dr. Bornstein, Epic’s CEO, and both Bornstein and colleague Yonatan Even seemed to be in a tight huddle drafting one or two, though, which Bornstein seemed to jot down. Now, Google lead attorney Glenn Pomerantz is whispering in Bornstein’s ear as well.
“You’ve got a hike to tell me that something has changed so much in the world that I should change that injunction, and I’m not hearing it,” he tells Epic and Google here in the courtroom.
We’re taking a 10-minute break, because the court reporter says she’s already typed 140 pages today and the fingers need a sec. Wow.
Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein is seemingly suggesting that that because the injunction doesn’t specifically stop Google from adding more friction, the proposed settlement where Google removes that friction would be better (by creating explicit programs for registered rival app stores).
Dr. Rose says she isn’t assuming Google’s behavior will stop, but thinks it’s in Google’s best interests not to get hauled back before the court. She says the court has to balance the pluses and minuses of the proposals before it, she’s just here to say that the settlement doesn’t seem to fix the network effects that led to Google’s firm grip over Android apps.
Epic’s lead attorney is asking Dr. Rose whether her analysis took proper account of whether having rival appstores available worldwide on Android might be more helpful than only mandating US app stores. The court’s existing injunction would mandate that rival stores would have the whole catalog of Android apps from day one.
Dr. Rose says “you can go to users and say we have all the apps you want to see when you join our app store, and similarly you can say to app developers that we’re going to have the whole catalog.”
Bornstein: “It does provide immediate access to a very small subset of those users.” But “it’s just the 4-5 percent of Android users who happen to live in this country,” he argues.
Both Dr. Rose and Judge Donato agree that we don’t know how much revenue that 4-5 percent generates. Donato rejects Epic’s offer to bring up a Google witness with a revenue figure, because Epic and Google are now working together and so there’s no lawyer here who can properly cross-examine that witness.
Google lead attorney Glenn Pomerantz says “it’s a lot” and seemingly wants to go point by point with her on a future date. The judge says they can do it right here and now in the courtroom. Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein is going first.
You’ll have to scroll down in our Epic v. Google StoryStream until I have time to go find the link, but Dr. Rose is showing up Dr. Bernheim’s earlier ideas here.
She says it’s “problematic to assume that Google will go back to the behavior that a jury found violated the antitrust laws” after the current three-year injunction ends, and that Epic could simply come back to the court to say so if it does, and perhaps ask for a three-year extension after the first three years are up. She’s also not sure why Google wouldn’t revert to bad behavior after six years if we’re assuming it would do so after three.
She says the court-ordered technical committee between Google and Epic can enact the other ideas in the settlement if they want. She also says that “decades of analysis in rate regulation” show that Google lowering its app store fees are not a substitute for creating a competitive market.
She tells the court it’s like a market owner who bars the doors and locks the gates after customers arrive, then a ditch outside fills with water “too deep and wide for anyone to cross.”
“It’s not going to help to tell the market owner to unlock the doors,” she says. “You have to lower the drawbridge for a while.” She says Judge Donato’s original injunction, which forces Google to crack open its app store by letting the apps out, is that drawbridge, and that Epic and Google are now trying to get rid of the drawbridge part.
Now that we’re done with Epic’s CEO and Google’s Android boss — both of whom are still in the room — Dr. Rose is here with her thoughts after evaluate the antitrust and economic effects of the proposed settlement. She says the court assigned her to do that.
Judge Donato asks Google’s Android boss whether he sees the catalog injunction (which would force Google to share its catalog of Google Play apps with rival stores) as a plus or minus. Samat says it’s a minus, primarily because Google doesn’t want to get blamed by developers and users when there are issues. He says he foresees Google getting caught in the middle between users, developers, and competing stores.
“Is that the only thing you can think of, that a developer might get upset because there’s a store they don’t want to be associated with?” asks Judge Donato. “The minus for Google is that catalog access and hosting rival app stores on Google Play creates competition that didn’t exist before, right?”
I missed getting the whole quote, but Samat says “we were seeking a way of achieving that goal without a fee in the middle.” Samat is done for the day, and we’re all taking another 10-minute break.
Judge Donato tells Android boss Sameer Samat that he already understands Google prefers the new proposed settlement to his injunction partly because it would settle litigation around the world. (Samat said he thinks international regulators may take their cues from the settlement too, because they see Epic as an advocate.) But he wants to know Google’s other motivations.
“By my reading of the deal, you are getting a lot, everything from hundreds of millions of payments over six years from one partnership, to Epic who said Google was a fake platform now championing the Android ecosystem [..] you’re getting a big present from Epic, so what are you doing for Epic?”
“Is there anything aside from buying peace globally?”
Samat says yes, he personally negotiated the new proposed settlement with Epic, starting last fall. He’s being questioned by Google’s lead attorney Glenn Pomerantz, as he’s Google’s witness; Epic and the judge have been asking all the questions up till now. Like Epic’s Sweeney, he says the reason to settle was to “reduce the amount of effort and energy” it would spend to keep fighting around the world.
“With the friction screens we lost 65 percent of users, with them removed we’re trending towards a 20 percent drop off rate,” he says, “which gives us confidence that installing stores from the web is a completely viable solution.” The point here is that Google and Epic’s new settlement no longer forces Google to host stores within its own store, but it does commit to removing the friction for web-based sideloading... as long as the stores are registered with Google’s proposed program and jump through whatever hoops Google has.
While Epic may be trying to make secret business deals with Google at the same time it’s trying to settle, Epic’s lead attorney Gary Bornstein made sure to ask Tim Sweeney to clarify one bit as soon as the courtroom re-opened for business. “Will the Epic Games Store get any special treatment from Android in the future under this deal?” he asked. Sweeney said no.
Sweeney told me he loved the bingo card we made during the trial, back in 2023. The courtroom is taking a 15-minute break now.
“I don’t see anything crooked about Epic paying Google off to encourage much more robust competition than they’ve allowed in the past,” he says, as the courtroom turns to page 8 of a term sheet that it’s not showing journalists... about Epic and Google’s secret new deal together.
The secret deal includes Unreal Engine, Tim slipped up to reveal, and it includes Epic spending $800 million over six years to purchase some sort of service from Google. (perhaps cloud?) We put about 80 percent into a different vendor [...] every year we’ve decided against Google, in this year we’re deciding to use Google at market rates,” he says. “We view this as a significant transfer of value from Epic to Google.”
He claims there’s not a joint product development deal with Google exactly. “This is Google and Epic each separately building product lines,” he says, after the judge points out a line in the document that reads “Google and Epic will work together.”
That’s Judge James Donato to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, asking him whether he thinks Google is an open platform today, when he called it a “fake open platform” in the past and had publicly given up on that ever changing.
Sweeney doesn’t have a great answer. Also, I missed copying down what he did said because I was so distracted by what the courtroom revealed right afterwards... one moment on that.
Sweeney says he reached out in late September of last year. “I reached out to Google after the 9th Circuit Court had ruled on the case, and Sameer Samat was willing to discuss.”
“I felt that events in the world in Epic v. Google and Epic v. Apple were going our way, but globally we were still facing a many year fight, country by country,” he says, deciding that settling was better than continuing to fight other cases around the world.
The judge is not buying this, as you’ll see in my next dispatch.
Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein, earlier:
“The reason we asked for global, it’s to ensure that even in the United States, there will be sufficient competition because there will be sufficient incentives for people like Epic and small companies to make the investment nescessary to get the scale they need to reach a sufficient portion of the users in the world, not just the 5 percent in the United States.”
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, now: “Developers make apps and ship them broadly across all of the world [...] every store will be able to do a much better job of serving US users if it can reach a worldwide audience.”
The original injunction only applies to the US, but the new proposed settlement has terms that would apply globally.
He was careful not to step on my backpack on his way out of the row; thank you, Tim.
The judge keeps asking Epic why it’s suddenly agreeing to settle with Google — and we’re now hearing a potentially controversial reason why. The courtroom has revealed that Epic and Google are in the middle of a deal that involves “joint product development, joint marketing commitment, joint partnerships,” and the judge is tentatively concerned that Epic is willing to ditch its biggest asks in exchange.
Bernheim is being quizzed on whether this is quid pro quo, and he keeps saying he doesn’t think so, but Judge Donato is letting him avoid discussing specifics because journalists are in the room.
Apparently Epic conducted an experiment with Digital Turbine as a partner, where users could click just once to install the Epic Games Store on their Android phone instead of going through the lengthy “unknown sources” flow. Bernheim claimed half of users failed to get through unknown sources, but 90 percent made it through one-click. Not surprising, but Epic is using it to suggest that a settlement where Google offers one-click to registered app stores would be better.
Some choice Donato quotes towards Epic’s lead attorney:
Judge Donato says he just doesn’t get it.
Here’s Epic’s lead attorney Gary Bornstein to answer:
“We love those remedies, period, full stop. We like them, we asked for them, we like them the way we asked for them. Now we have another option that’s on the table that’s the result of a negotiation with Google. We got something through this negotiation that was not on the table before.”
“The only reason Epic is here is because Epic believes this set of remedies in totality will provide longer-term sustainable competition,” says Bornstein. He says holding out for something like this is “the reason Epic didn’t take payoffs back in the day” from Google’s Project Hug and similar.
Judge Donato says that with three years to set up competing app stores on Android, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and more will surely pile on. “The problem we have now is the box has already been rigged terribly with anticompetitive conduct so that Google is way ahead.”
The overarching question: “Three years and a day, what’s going to happen?”
Bernheim says even if they build those stores, Google will cut off Amazon and co. “Google at that point in time is going to say you can’t have an app that downloads things.” Or erect more friction to sideloading apps.
I don’t quite understand how that changes if were six years rather than three, or why Google wouldn’t shut down its proposed Registered App Store program the same way if that got approved.
“By taking away one part of what I’ve proposed, the effectiveness of the other part declines,” says Bernheim, answering the judge’s question about why he didn’t bring all these proposals before.
“The choice was presented to me that if you want these provisions, which of these do you want? Do you want the ones that are going to provide the better opportunities for competitions to survive, that were in my proposals, or the ones that allow competition to get jumpstarted, which were also in my proposals, which do you pick?”
He seems to be saying that Judge Donato didn’t pick enough of them to make a real dent when he issued his permanent injunction, and didn’t make it last long enough or apply around the world, and so what he truly wanted for competition isn’t happening anyways. So the new settlement is overall better, he’s arguing.
“Why did you press so hard for catalog access if you’re willing to throw it out the window today?” asks Judge Donato.
Bernheim replies: “I don’t want to throw it out [...] I would love to keep it.”
Bernheim says there’s a tradeoff, though. “If you want to get competition going and as a compliment to that you have a remedy that will ensure the competition, once it develops, will continue, that it has a path for continuing, then those remedies that we’ve described will be extremely effective.”
That’s Judge James Donato, continuing to be skeptical, addressing Doug Bernheim, the Epic economist.
Bernheim agrees with the judge that Google still monopolizes the Android app market and payments market; that the facts haven’t materially changed on the ground.
Bernheim says he “would love to have all” of the anti-Google monopoly recommendations he originally argued for, but that he’s just analyzing what’s in front of him, and that Judge Donato’s existing injunction simply doesn’t last long enough at just three years rather than six.
“When that ends, developers are going to be very dependent on off-Google Play distribution,” he says. “To the extent those frictions are still in place, that will be a problem at that point in time [...] they’ll be reliant on a process that has already been shown not to work well.”
He brings up the example of how Amazon’s Appstore never got traction because users had to click through too many Google barriers.
“You called catalog access THE critical remedy to counter the network effects and the pattern of dominance,” says Donato, suggesting that Bernheim is attempting to mislead by suggesting the settlement would be viable without forcing Google to offer up its catalog of apps to rival app stores.
“I questioned you about the need for the duration period, and you said it was such a critical remedy you advocated for a period twice as long,” says Donato.
