Sean Hollister

The jury filed out, the judge thanked both parties for preparing the case well and arguing it efficiently... and now, we’re done until there’s a verdict! It sounds like the jury will eat lunch before beginning deliberations, so I should have time to grab some food as well.

“What did they say in their documents? That tells you what they believed in the real world.”

He begins by showing one of the emails Google showed us about reacting to an Apple change in price — and that Google chose not to follow that price change at the time.

“They chose not to change their price despite believing that Apple was changing theirs,” he says, and “during that time not a single developer pulled out of the Play Store to focus on iOS.”

He also took us back to the testimony of an Epic employee who was more than uncomfortable with Epic’s Project Liberty trap for Google, asking, “Are we just pawns in Tim’s game?”

“Consider this: the facts remain unchanged. The data remains unchanged,” begins Kravis.

“Time and again during this trial, you saw Epic overreach,” he adds, explaining how Epic wasn’t able to prove things like Project Hug were direct bribes or that Samsung was in collusion with Google.

Perhaps thinking about the judge’s warning, Epic moves on — Kravis is now pointing out that Epic is just trying to get a free ride on Google Play now. Here’s one quote from that:

“Epic can’t pocket the money in its own store and then stand up here and tell you it’s trying to protect the consumer.”

“You can review them during your deliberations, and when you do, you will see they say nothing — nothing — about developers not being able to open their competing app stores.”

He points out even Epic CEO Tim Sweeney didn’t believe Activision Blizzard truly wanted to open its own app store.

“This is an android phone manufacturer telling you this helps us build better phones at a lower cost — this is pro competitive,” says Kravis.

Mind you, the Motorola testimony is also when we saw that Google does directly pay some OEMs not to preload rival app stores.

“What evidence did you see during this trial that compressing three steps into two steps or one step would fix this alleged harm?” Kravis rhetorically asks the jury.

I’ve thought for a while that Epic mostly lost the sideloading argument, and Google’s really driving it home.