I’m very curious if there’ll be any documents to back up Morrill’s suggestion there.
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.
We’re looking at the old “Hollywood” process to install the Amazon Appstore, one step at a time. Some of the steps are Amazon sign-in and download steps. Many of them are Google’s Android operating system steps. Added up, it looks like a LOT of friction.
But again, Google showed in court, in a video, that sideloading the Epic Games Store can take just 25 seconds now.
Amazon’s Donn Morrill says Google’s decision not to allow alternative app stores in Google Play “strongly discouraged users from discovering” and installing the Amazon Appstore on Android.
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.)
I’m not sure we’ve heard that number before — Amazon exec Donn Morrill just read it off a spreadsheet prepped by lawyers without questioning it. He says Amazon incurred roughly $1.4 billion in expenses on the Appstore from 2015 through 2021.
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’re done with Epic’s big-name witnesses like Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney — who will come next? (We never did hear another peep about “father of Android” Andy Rubin’s video deposition, for that matter...)
We’ll probably begin with Amazon exec Donn Morrill, though, whose testimony barely began before the judge told us all to go home yesterday.
Last tidbit of the day: Amazon’s Donn Morrill says the Amazon Appstore’s actual commission rate was calculated at roughly 10 percent.
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.
We’re listening to video deposition from August 11, 2022, with Donn Morrill, a director of apps at Amazon who’s also worked with teams on the company’s Alexa voice assistant.
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?
“We cannot sell out of PlayStation at a lower price than we sell on PlayStation,” says Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, referring to a most favored nations (MFN) clause in the contract with Sony.
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.
Epic: “Does Tencent control Epic?”
Sweeney: “No.”
“Who does?”
“I do. I’m the controlling shareholder of Epic.”
What about Tencent?
“I came up with the idea of Project Liberty, and when we disclosed to them, they were rather surprised.”