Sean Hollister

If these really popular apps wanted to be in the Samsung app store, they could do that, right?” asked Google.

Bernheim says yes, they could.

Google also clarified that developers don’t literally pay 79 cents for every app download, in case that confused anyone. “No, that takes the form of the fees,” says Bernheim.

In fact, after I’d already written half this post, Bernheim called out Google’s attorney, live: “Wait, you just changed what you were asking about. You were asking about commission rates, and now we’re talking about price.”

Google’s been trying to argue that because billions of people have smartphones, even a small percentage switching every, say, 2.7 years is a lot of switching (and perhaps evidence of substitution?)

“Is it fair to say you’ve been paid north of a million dollars for this case?”

He says his compensation is “much more complicated” because the money doesn’t flow to him directly.

“It’s more complicated because you’re a partner at a consulting firm and you get paid a share of the profits,” says Google’s attorney. Bernheim says yes.

We’ve seen this gambit before, but it cuts both ways. (Not relevant to the case but: I wonder what the lawyers in this courtroom are paid!)

He hasn’t quite admitted it yet, but it definitely looks like he didn’t based on his replies and dodges so far.

(After several “real-world” probes from Google, Judge Donato got a laugh across the courtroom by shutting that specific phrase down. “We’re only talking about the real world here,” he said. Reader, I LOL’d.)

Google’s attorney is beginning with apps:

“It’s true isn’t it that the quality and variety of apps is an important factor for the device people buy, isn’t it?”

Bornheim won’t go quite that far, but he seems to be admitting that some apps do launch on the iPhone first.

78 cents per app download in 2021, he says — compared to 61 cents in 2020, 46 cents in 2019, 35 cents in 2018, 26 cents in 2017, 19 cents in 2016, and 15 cents in 2015.

Nor did they just start playing on other platforms like PlayStation, he says. “There’s no indication of substitution of usage to other platforms.” He’s been arguing that the lack of substitutes shows where a company has monopoly power.

(When Google and Apple booted the game off their store, it did keep working, but those players got left behind. I would also point out that Fortnite on mobile didn’t have much retention to begin with, though.)

We’re now looking at a slide dramatically presenting a clip art pair of imbalanced scales, with a “small increase in price of Android app distribution” getting significantly tipped by the “absence of low-end iPhones,” “infrequency of phone purchases,” “learning costs” and other conclusions about the costs of switching to an iPhone.

Now, we’ve moved onto smartphone pricing: he’s suggesting that Apple and Android have targeted different markets with their phones — and that they’ve continued to diverge, with the price of the average Android phone generally getting lower while the average iPhone price gets higher.