Sean Hollister

He’s also telling both sides we don’t need to go through sideloading screens or redefine what MADA is or go through anything we’ve already heard three times before. “We’re going to start losing people,” he says.

“Everything new and fresh next week, otherwise I may have to ask you to stop.”

Next week, we’ll hear from both side’s economists. Then Google plans to call six witnesses (including three Google employees) to help bring its counterclaim against Epic (for breach of contract, etc.).

Both sides are supposed to file their final proposed jury instructions tomorrow — the questions the jury may actually have to decide (pending approval by the judge).

Earlier, the judge said we needed to finish the cross-examination of Google’s expert today no matter what. “You’ve got 15 minutes,” he said five minutes ago. “Remember this is an antitrust case.”

I wonder what he meant by the last part.

I’m fascinated with how many questions in this courtroom have been a lawyer asking something they already asked months ago — partly so the jury can see if they’re being consistent and partly so the lawyer can get to a new question that builds on top of the previous answer.

In particular, Epic has found that 880 million devices were listed as from unknown countries. Epic also found that smart TVs and Chromecasts were included in his data.

Dr. Qian is saying these findings don’t change his conclusion.

We’ve never seen this spreadsheet or his chart before in the courtroom — we’ve only heard the billion user figure stated as fact.

He also suggests users could be desensitized to the new warning screens and just click through. (But doesn’t that apply to any warning screen? What’s the point of mass warning screens at all if we assume desensitization by default?)

And, he suggests, a bad actor could steal the key to sign bad apps, making them look like good ones. He says that’s not just a theoretical risk.

(I’ll point out that a Microsoft signing key got stolen and led to the theft of US government emails.)

I’m not necessarily buying that argument: haven’t we seen in this trial that Google mandates quite a few things with regards to its partners? Maybe a Samsung has the bargaining power, though.

He says bad apps can use polymorphism to avoid detection by scan, making “every single version look different.”