Sean Hollister

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.

We may need to make a CHATS T-shirt, like the EMAILS one we used to sell.

(Kolotouros could not swear to it but said he could not recall sending any chats relevant to the legal case during that period.)

(She’s going through slide after slide, slide deck after slide deck, with Kolotouros, and he’s saying yes, Apple is not mentioned.)

Epic’s attorney made this sound like a forced / bribed choice, and while that’s still within the realm of possibility based on what we’ve heard, it seems more complicated than that.

Google also says that OEMs can put some phones in its Premier tier (eligible for full rev share) and other phones in a different tier — and that 95 percent of Android phones in the US are not part of the Premier tier, so nothing prevents them from preloading a non-Google app store on those phones if they wanted to.