Sean Hollister

“Even if it didn’t get the exemption, Motorola could still enter into the preload deal, that would just reduce the percentage of devices in the MIA portfolio, right?” asks a lawyer.

“That’s a fair way to say it,” replies Christensen. (So Lenovo is simply getting paid less for fewer devices in compliance, I believe I’m hearing.)

We are done with testimony for the day but listening to the judge talking to both lawyers about what’s coming next.

“The primary benefit had been for us to differentiate ourselves compared to the likes of Samsung, for example,” he says.

Later, he was asked if Motorola had any non-contractual reasons to avoid preloading another store. “The most common reason that exists is because of redundancy for consumers,” he says. Obviously Motorola can’t pre-load the iOS App Store, and “most stores available as a third-party store are more limited,” he says.

“So we think it’s in the consumer’s best interests to have one.” Google Play is that one.

In 2020, if over 95 percent of Motorola devices were compliant, parent Lenovo would receive $5.3 million, Christensen explained.

For 2021, the amount was $6 million.

One of the requirements for compliance (bolding mine):

This may be a good find for Epic, because it appears to be a direct payment — not a complicated deal that involves co-marketing or revenue share. Even though it’s similar to what Google requires with its RSAs, it looks more like Epic’s argument that Google pays some companies not to compete. Not every OEM had an MIA — the Department of Justice alleged that LG and Motorola were the ones.

“To consolidate our engineering efforts into fewer OS solutions was definitely the priority at the time,” he says.

Earlier: “I don’t think we’re able to license iOS from Apple, so Android is what we end up shipping.”

(Motorola arguably produced the first breakout hit Android phones with the Motorola Droid line. The first Android phone was an HTC device, the HTC Dream, which was branded as the carrier-exclusive T-Mobile G1 in the United States.)

He says he was responsible for the revenue sharing agreements between Motorola and Google, in a taped deposition we’re watching from July 2022 — and they were initially about a share of Google’s search revenue, he says. Google has tried to suggest that its search revenue share (with Apple, anyhow) isn’t relevant to this Android case.

And with that, Miner’s purpose in the courtroom for Google has largely ended? Google asked one last question — Miner said he believes Android would have been confusing if there wasn’t “a single place for people to publish their apps.”

He has stepped down from the witness stand, and we’re on break.

“If we don’t excel, shame on us, what we don’t like is when someone else has a competitive advantage,” he said.

You may be able to find the video right here — the place and year match up, but I can’t seem to download it on courtroom Wi-Fi to be absolutely sure.

In an old deposition, Miner said under oath that he “maybe” thought the intent was that a level playing field should apply to Google Play when other developers build app stores, too.

But carriers “eventually realized and heard us when we talked about the ability to have one place worldwide that was collecting apps and would have the ability to distribute on their network,” he says.

I imagine getting 25 or 30 percent of Android’s app store revenue didn’t hurt, either.

We were supposed to hear from Andy Rubin, the embattled “father of Android,” but we haven’t had any sign that his taped deposition will wind up getting played in court.

Right now, he’s just saying some things about why the early team wanted Android to be designed as an open platform and explaining how hard it was to get an app onto Verizon’s app platform back in the day.

“Phones and mobile networks were boring, the internet was all the rage” was the idea, and Android started talking to Google just in hopes of an endorsement, he said.