Sean Hollister

She also showed us surveys that 87 percent of teenagers went for an iPhone in 2022, and that Meta’s internal research shows 34 percent of its Android monthly active users switched away from Android during the four-year period from 2016 to 2020 and 14 percent just from 2019 to 2020. (She did not show us how many switched from iPhone to Android during that period.)

The judge doesn’t seem quite as enrapt; then again, he’d warned both parties earlier today about time.

Update: She’s also clearly gunning for Dr. Bernheim, who was a force for Epic the other day. She keeps bringing up how he’s mistaken in one way or another, how some finding “wouldn’t be relevant in Dr. Bernheim’s world” for example.

Because Google’s economist Tucker did. “Why does it matter to you as an economist that Apple sees Google as a competitor?” Google’s lawyer just asked her.

Her reply: “It matters when you see a competitor that’s not part of this case actually say we’re competing against Google Play.”

Google is now walking through a series of slides and questions that show where they compete — so far, we’ve seen features (one will launch a new feature, the other will match) and pricing.

Her conclusions are:

Those are some major ways to say Epic’s economists are wrong, and she doesn’t stop there: she says Epic turned “a single really easy to understand market into lots of little things... it allows them to carve off things, but in a way which doesn’t make sense.”

“An equally effective app store would have to compensate not only for the RSA 3.0 revenue, but also for the loss of all the apps and APIs that come with the MADA?” Google attorney Even asked Google’s economist Gentzkow.

Let me translate: if Amazon wanted to put the Amazon Appstore on a flagship Android phone, one which had opted into an RSA 3.0 contract in exchange for a substantial share of Google Play revenue and includes the APIs that let it be a full flagship Android phone (thanks to a MADA contract), wouldn’t Amazon need to pay enough to offset all those things that Google is providing, which would disappear without those contracts?

Gentzkow was not happy with the question, and clearly wanted to say more, but he basically said yes.

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.”