Sean Hollister

Asked Epic’s lawyer: “Your goals were not to compete?”

Rosenberg replied that the point was to join Samsung in competing against Apple. I suspect that Epic’s lawyers will gleefully point out that none of the documents mention Apple a little later today.

In the meanwhile, Epic is pointing out how uncompetitive this bit from Rosenberg’s email seems:

“If we couldn’t use rev share to secure confidence that they won’t drive down to 5%, then we wouldn’t do it.”

We’re now seeing that one of Google’s goals for Project Banyan was effectively to puppet the Galaxy Store and provide a false choice for users. The agreement as proposed would see Google Play and the Galaxy Store side by side on the default homescreen, just like today, but Google would host the games, provide the billing, security, and updates in the Galaxy Store, too.

In exchange, Google would create a “financial agreement to help Samsung’s services revenue goal and justify deprioritizing the Galaxy Store,” the proposal suggested.

Again, Google and Samsung did not go through with Project Banyan.

Here is a message Google sent to Samsung afterwards:

Epic attorney Yonatan Even is accusing Google of having a handshake deal with Samsung not to compete too much. He points to how Google invokes the name of Samsung mobile president DJ Koh — and how Samsung quickly responds that “It was done by the Service team without my knowledge. I am looking into it now.”

“I wouldn’t characterize it as a handshake deal,” says Google former Play head Jamie Rosenberg.

But no! Instead, Epic highlighted a 2017 passage that showed Google thought existing 14-step sideloading process already presented a “significant hurdle to switching to Amazon APK,” despite Amazon providing a 15 percent-plus discount to developers app store fees compared to Google Play.

I guess Epic’s trying to show the barriers to entry were already high due to Google’s work? “It did not become large,” says Rosenberg, of the Amazon Appstore.

Amazon didn’t want to lose paying users. A couple juicy passages (bolding Google’s):

“I’m guessing the Vudu app uses its own billing so we’d be inconsistent if we pushed [DirecTV] to something different on policy grounds.”

“I fear that [YouTube] is trying to find reasons not to use Play’s in-app billing for its premium services [...] this is not about money or control, it puts us in a difficult position with our third-party ecosystem if we have a first-party app that doesn’t use Play billing.”

Epic’s attorney suggests YouTube didn’t migrate to Google Play Billing until after Epic’s Fortnite lawsuit. Google concedes it didn’t migrate until after its (post-lawsuit) policy change, which mandated Play Billing for apps thereafter.

Later in the email:

The context was a deal with News Corp for The Wall Street Journal to integrate Google’s subscription billing services at a 30 percent rev share, it seems.

Google Plus integration was another thing Google would apparently “pay” for at the time.

Correction: 2013, not 2023. I typo’d.

He was Kochikar’s boss and Kolotouros’ boss — the latter seemed to be quite angry with him at one time. Time to hear about the early days of Google Play Billing, it seems.

We’re on lunch break, waiting for the courtroom to reopen.