Sean Hollister

Also, Google is pointing out that Amazon Fire tablets included sideloading scare screens as well:

Guess sideloading friction wasn’t just Google’s fault?

As of 2021, “Amazon had significantly fewer apps (456k) than Apple (1.85m) or Google (2.65m)” according to an Amazon doc.

Here are a couple of compelling things he said: the Amazon Appstore cannot be easily and automatically updated if it’s sideloaded — and so wouldn’t automatically receive security fixes from Amazon, either. That could cut against Google’s argument that its way is more secure.

But again, Google showed in court, in a video, that sideloading the Epic Games Store can take just 25 seconds now.

It was “materially part of the reason for the limitations of the Amazon Appstore on Android,” he says.

At one point, Amazon saw in testing, only 11 percent of users who visited the Amazon Appstore’s mobile install page wound up successfully installing it.

(That number appears to be for a proposal to replace Amazon’s “Hollywood” install flow with a newer “Spelljammer” install flow, though we clicked away before I could read more. I wonder if Spelljammer had better results.)

In 2018, roughly a third of the Appstore’s sales came from Android. By the end of 2021, it was less than 10 percent, he testified — with third-party Android devices (read: not Kindle Fire tablets) contributing “just north of $15 million.” That’s tiny. It helps make Epic’s point that a sideloaded app store isn’t really a viable competitor to Google Play on Android.

We’ll probably begin with Amazon exec Donn Morrill, though, whose testimony barely began before the judge told us all to go home yesterday.

We also saw Amazon paid some developers one-time fees of up to $100,000 to develop apps and would sometimes offer other deals.

See you tomorrow! We’re off starting Wednesday, though, and will stay off through Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

Google was once worried about Amazon stealing its whales, but that threat didn’t materialize, and it’s still not clear whether Google needed to change a thing to keep it from happening. Do we get that now, or will his deposition touch on a different facet of Android friction?

That sounds familiar — I think we spotted something like that in a Sony contract during the Epic v. Apple trial, but I can’t find it at this moment.

Google tried to suggest this was shady since Sony is now an Epic Games shareholder, but Sweeney says it’s a standard part of PlayStation contracts.

And (minus a couple bits I didn’t quite catch) we’re done with Tim Sweeney. On to a taped deposition from an Amazon executive: Donn Morrill.