I did it recently, and it did take a while to get my phone set up just the way I liked, but I had the essentials ready to go on Android (coming from iPhone) pretty fast. Same was true when I switched the other way in 2018.
Google is starting its cross-examination by being the friend Epic wasn’t. Rasanen explains that her job was to work with developers not only to “help adopt our products and features and hear their feedback” but to make sure “we can understand the developer’s perspective.” To make sure they were being heard, she says.
Epic asked if that was true, and Rasanen said yes, that’s what the spreadsheet shows.
Presenting her with all the numbers, Epic attorney Hueston asks: “The studies we’ve seen show that people buy phones for reasons that are primarily other than the App Store, right?”
She waffles. He presents a new slide titled “Top reasons for smartphone purchase,” a list with maybe a dozen reasons including these top four:
I liked the smartphone brand
My prior smartphone stopped working or slowed down
The price of the smartphone was afffordable
It was a good deal
“Nowhere in that list is the app store identified as a reason for purchasing the smartphone, right?” asks Hueston.
She answers: “The app store, no.”
If they had an iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, according to Google’s survey, 98 percent of them weren’t considering a switch.
I didn’t catch when this survey was from as we paged around quite a bit, but Epic showed us internal Google studies from both 2021 and 2020 to make its larger switching costs argument.
“While owners may consider the other OS, the intent to use another OS is incredibly low, potentially driven by high switching costs and/or loyalty to their existing OS,” reads part of an internal Google study from June 2020.
We’re getting a whirlwind tour of several studies now — depending on the date, they suggest that just 9 percent, 12 percent, or as low as 6 percent of surveyed Android users would switch. (Even fewer iOS users were switching to Android, they suggested, at 9 percent, 12 percent, and 6 percent, respectively.)
One study did show that “roughly one-fifth of iOS and Android are considering another operating system for their next purchase,” but Epic has already somewhat defused that counterargument:
“And you’ll agree with me that people say they’re considering lots of things they don’t end up doing, right?” asked Epic’s lawyer.
“Yes, I agree with that,” laughed Rasanen.
This is Epic’s argument, not an old Google document, as laid out for the jury in a “demonstrative” slide:
Cost
Time: people keep their phones 2.8 years on average
Switching phones = switching ecosystems
It feels a lot like learning a foreign language
Transfer and set up involves an average of 40 steps and 9 hours
There is no one place for help
A successful transfer of data does not equal a successful switch
Losing data
Apps/feature incompatibility
Phone spec inequality
Users are attached to key features
Users’ technical acumen
Committed to other devices in the ecosystem.
So far, Rasanen has only been able to argue with “time.” “There are reasons people don’t switch, but time isn’t a reason in and of itself,” she said.
And it’s relying partially on an old internal Google study, prepared by Rasanen, if I heard correctly. Here’s the executive summary:
Switching phones = switching ecosystems
You not only have to learn how to use a new OS, but completely new platforms around it.
It feels a lot like learning a foreign language.
From iOS to Android; from App Store to Play Store; from iTunes to Play Music / Google Music / etc; from iOS coreApps to infinite choices.
It really IS NOT as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Transfer and set up involves an average of 40 steps and can take as long as 9 hours if you use the cloud.
There is no ONE place for help.
It needs to be clear and easy to find the right switching resources. We have 4 websites currently.
A successful transfer of data does not equal a successful switch.
Switching happens in 3 phases. Prep work, data transfer, and then adapting to the new phone.
It’s an individual experience.
Because what’s on our phone is unique to us, the process and what works/does not work is is also individual.
Epic is not being a good friend back to Rasanen, though. It just pulled up an old deposition where she seemed to admit she wasn’t actually “in the developer’s corner” the way a Google developer-facing presentation portrayed.
Today, she says, “I would disagree with the characterization that I didn’t want to have a fair developer ecosystem.” But after seeing her old deposition, she clarifies, “My job wasn’t to ensure fairness.” She says it was to help developers create great apps and make sure they follow Google’s policies.
She’s in a corner, that’s for sure — the one Epic just painted her into.
Wrote Rasanen:
This is a risk in so far as YT sets an example for the developer ecosystem so if we can get them looking like GPB, it eliminates the “but Google’s own apps aren’t using it...” argument and just makes things a bit cleaner.
“We considered that, yes,” she says on the stand. It’s not clear if Google went through with it.
Epic lawyer John Hueston is repeatedly trying to drive home that Google preferenced its own apps, including YouTube and YouTube Music.
Google has already conceded it didn’t migrate YouTube to Google Play Billing for many years after it started asking developers to switch.
Kirsten Rasanen is Epic’s new best friend, as far as her emails are concerned — in 2018, she internally stated Google Play was not how users were discovering new apps at all.
“Users DO know what the Play Store is and they actually use it... but only for installs,” she wrote in bold. “But they don’t use the play store for any app discovery at all.”
“Play Store offers little value for app discovery,” she repeated later. Based on what I’m seeing, I expect Google will argue her conversations with colleagues were based on anecdotal reports (from friends, family, individual users).
