Sean Hollister

That’s what Kochikar wrote to other key Google partnership leads in December 2019.

And in an old deposition, Kochikar agreed the Project Hug requirement to simultaneously ship games on Google Play was intended to disincentive alternative app stores — apparently not just because Google wanted the games, too.

She concedes there’s no Motorola app store preloaded on Motorola phones in the United States, nor a OnePlus app store on OnePlus phones in the United States.

Now, we’re seeing an email that definitely looks like Google was only inclined to do a special deal with Activision Blizzard King “if it saves Play.” Is this the evidence we were waiting for? Hmm.

Google’s VP of Play partnerships, Purnima Kochikar, is still on the stand; Google hasn’t had a chance to talk to her yet.

We’re looking forward to seeing Google explain why User Choice Billing wasn’t fake, and why it thinks 15-plus-step sideloading is reasonable. (Expect to hear something about safety and security there.)

In a document justifying the deal, Google wrote that “Fortnite’s absence could result in $130M (up to $250M) direct revenue loss with Play” and that there could be a “downstream impact of $550M (up to $3.6B) potential revenue loss if broad contagion to other developers.” But Epic said no.

Another argument that Epic’s lawyer didn’t highlight but I spotted below: “the [Play] store will still attract billions of users who will search for Fortnite and run into deadends that aren’t clear how to resolve.”

I wonder if Google wound up making the latter argument!

She wasn’t just talking about how many steps it took to sideload apps. In the same email, she wrote that “the user experience, and the security risks that come with it, is giving us some real concern.”

But she also admitted in an old deposition that the steps were definitely part of it — and that even a big company like Amazon would have trouble distributing their apps outside Google Play.

The context: Google was prepping to convince Epic to launch Fortnite on Google Play instead of as a sideloaded APK.

But we’re now looking at a painfully slow walkthrough of how many steps it took (in 2015) to sideload an app on a phone — far longer than it takes a user to actually do this themselves.

I wonder if Google will pull out a phone and show literally just how fast it goes. Still, I admit the sideloading process includes some scary warnings.

The BLANK rate on the page is that rate, right? Yes, says Kochikar.

There would be an adjustment to that number, right? “Spotify’s number would be adjusted up or down to reflect Google’s actual costs, right?” Yes.

Oh, but this part is going somewhere: “A games developer does not have the option to use its own payment system, correct?” Yes, except in Korea, she says.

Ah well, we tried.

The jury is now getting passed pieces of paper with the numbers on them.

“Of course, as we noted, at a reduction of 5%, we don’t think this solves the problems of any devs who are complaining about price,” reads another line from the same document.

Why? “A key element of this optionality proposal is we don’t want to give any artificial reasons to incent devs to switch off Play Billing.”

Excepting any sweetheart deals, Google wound up launching User Choice Billing at a 4 percent reduction, not even 5 percent. And in an old deposition, Kochikar admitted that devs wound up paying the same effective service fee in the end — apparently because they still have to pay an alternative payment processor in addition to Google’s rate.