Sean Hollister

The judge wasn’t having it.

But we did learn that “there is a rate set much, much lower than the rates you’ve been hearing about at trial.”

It did forecast losses of $40 million to $50 million per year after the forced switch a few years later, though, so I suppose it was eating some.

The actual decline for Badoo on Android was 9.2 percent, it sounds like, but I missed some of the other important context there. One of the hits to Badoo was that Google Play didn’t support one-day subscriptions, Watts testified.

Google announced three months later, in November 2022, that Bumble would be joining the pilot program to allow alternative payment methods on Android. That has since happened, Google spokesperson Dan Jackson reminds me. We’re asking how much revenue Bumble shares with Google.

Watts says the apps used to pay 3–6 percent per user transaction with alternative payment methods — compared to 15–30 percent now. He says the web versions count for less than 10 percent of the company’s revenue and claims no alternative Android store is a viable alternative.

“Customers are used to finding apps within the Play Store, and that’s core to our business.” The Galaxy Store “doesn’t have the same scale,” he says.

“Paddle has a financial interest in Epic winning its lawsuit, doesn’t it? If Epic wins, you’d be able to compete to win tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, right?”

“That would be my hope,” says Owens.

Google went on to use Paddle to help advance its argument that app platforms deserve more money than simple payment processors, having Owens admit that it charges more than PayPal or Stripe because it offers more services.

And that Paddle, unlike Google, doesn’t offer parental controls, budgets, and the ability to save payment info from different developers.

One internal Google slide titled “Google-wide ROI shows positive contribution of $1.2B” suggested that Google would spend $1.78 billion from 2019–2022 on “Play Risk Mitigation.”

It showed Google spending a projected $95M in 2019, $294M in 2020, $588M in 2021, and $803M in 2022.

There was also a field called “total cost to serve,” where Google would spend a projected $994M over that same period: $50M in 2019; $340M in 2020; $316M in 2021; and $288M in 2022.

I can see some of the exhibits in the courtroom as they’re entered into evidence, though, and I’ll do my best to highlight any particularly interesting bits for now.

Epic will likely try to use Owens to show how easy it is to stand up such a system and, thus, that Google doesn’t deserve so much money for Google Play. But we haven’t gotten that far yet.