Sean Hollister

If only 19 percent of US devices have ever enabled Unknown Sources, doesn’t that mean 81 percent have never enabled it? Gentzkow says that’s right. It’s as high as 85 percent in Japan and 75 or 76 percent in Germany that haven’t enabled the ability to sideload apps, not once, ever.

He also repeated a successful move Epic used a week ago with a different Google expert, pointing out fully one third of Google’s data on its devices was listed as coming from “unknown” countries as well as devices that weren’t actually phones. He got Gentzkow to admit he simply excluded an entire third of the data that may or may not have been relevant when preparing his charts and conclusions.

(The “nearly $3M” is as of March 2023, by the way; Gentzkow says the total is slightly higher now.)

That was measured between April 2020 and February 2021, according to the graph.

We also saw a slide suggesting most Fortnite players bought their V-Bucks elsewhere: between April and August 2020, only 2.8 percent of US users purchased any at all from Google Play, with 40.3 percent opting for other billing systems and 56.8 percent purchasing none at all.

• Other platforms require their own payment system, like Airbnb, Amazon, eBay, Lyft, Uber, Taskrabbit, Roku, Steam, and Walmart

• We saw a slide with 21 different bullet pointed items Google has added to Play to support developers over the years

• In China, where Google is not so active, Gentzkow says app developers face a “fractured app store landscape” with service fees often higher than 50 percent (let alone 30 percent), and users see more fake apps, malware, and have more difficulty finding what they’re looking for

• Only 0.4 percent of the devices capable of running Fortnite (as of November 16th, 2021) were on the RSA 3.0 Premier Tier, and so “RSA 3.0 did not block Epic distribution.”

According to the slide, it also paid $60M to Apple, a company it did sue — and $17M to Gearbox during the same period.

Outside of China, only 7.4 percent of active Android devices are on the Premier Tier, according to one of the slides Google just presented, and roughly 27 percent of Android activations are on the Premier Tier as of July 2022.

(The latter does seem like a lot to me, though, particularly if you buy one of Google’s common arguments in this trial that it serves billions of people and so even small percentages add up to a lot.)

If he was referring to OEMs, I don’t quite follow the logic: who was Google competing with there? Google’s not competing to put Android on those phones, since OEMs couldn’t decide to put iOS on a phone instead.

Is Google Play the product that it’s discounting beyond free to pay those developers to carry? And if so, doesn’t that cut against Google’s argument that those developers needed Google Play and other Google apps to compete with the iPhone?

Symbian had 49.8 percent of the market, and BlackBerry had 15.9 percent, with 12.9 percent for Apple, 11.1 percent for Microsoft, 7.2 percent for Linux, and 2.1 percent for Palm.

I didn’t quite catch the full point that Gentzkow was trying to make, apologies. Google did point out that all those players have disappeared, save Apple.

We’ve moved on to an argument that Google’s MADA agreements are good for competition because they help Google compete with the iPhone, which helps sell phones, and in turn, helps developer sell more apps. “The more phones are sold the more things are going to be downloaded,” he says.

“Project Hug offers valuable things to developers in exchange for putting their apps into the store, and it’s natural” to expect the “Nikes” of the world to put their latest and greatest apps on Google Play right away as part of said deal, he argues.

“Macy’s needs to compete for that business by offering Nike a great deal,” he says.

We’re now off for lunch.