Android Introduces $2-4 Install Fee and 10–20% Cut for Us External Content Links
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The debate rages on as Google introduces a $2-4 install fee and 10-20% cut for US external content links on Android, sparking concerns over the tech giant's alleged anti-competitive practices. Commenters are divided, with some, like nsagent, drawing parallels to Apple's recent court rulings, while others, like dagmx, argue that the Apple ruling was misinterpreted, and Google's fees might be justified. As the discussion unfolds, insights emerge on the true costs behind Google's fees, with hirsin pointing out that the $4 fee is for providing the platform, not serving the file itself. The thread is abuzz with speculation on how industry players like Tim Sweeney will react, and whether this move will stifle innovation or simply reflect the value Google provides.
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The costs provided here may very well fall into the acceptable boundaries for the courts.
But it seems to me that the court is trying to enforce some kind of middle ground, which doesn't make sense. There's no legal principle one can use to curtail the power of an IP holder aside from mandating it be given away for free. Indeed, the whole idea of IP law is that the true value of the underlying property can only be realized if the property owner has the power of the state to force others to negotiate for it. Apple was told "you can charge for your IP" and said "well all our fee is actually licensing, except for the 3% we pay per transaction". The courts rejected this, so... I mean, what does Apple do now? Keep whittling down the fee until the court finds it reasonable? That can't possibly be good faith compliance (as if Apple has ever complied in good faith lol).
You're describing property in general. Not just IP.
> Apple was told "you can charge for your IP"
It's a bit misleading to use quotes in this case, given you aren't quoting the court.
The four dollars is for providing the platform that the user used to navigate to the link and download the zip file.
That's a fun bit of argument from the owners of Chrome.
These rules aren’t for linking out from the store to a third party site, but rather for installing an app from the store and then linking out to a third party payment.
And does not include showing up first in search results for your app's name. That's a separate fee you'll need to pay.
1. I think uptake of third party stores is quite low and there’s a strong incentive to stay available on the primary store
2. The App Store model has very much been that the paid apps are subsidizing the free ones. So it’s somewhat fair to charge for using the infrastructure, if you’re not contributing into the pot (and are siphoning away from it)
3. Those per install costs are brutal. I was thinking they’d do a dollar , but at almost $4, they’re outside what most people would spend. This is a strong way to keep F2P games from instituting external payment processing.
But these are likely irrelevant comparisons.
For one thing, the degree of monopolization simply doesn’t exist. Gaming is a market. There are many gaming platforms that are extremely popular. Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Steam, and then just open distribution on PCs which essentially means there is no lock in in this industry. And unlike the “web app” comparison folks try to make, open distribution can easily leverage the same capabilities as the store distributed games can (and in fact, they are more capable than games from some stores, like the Windows store).
But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
People depend on these platforms. There are businesses you cannot interact with if not through your phone. There are public transportation systems that are almost unusable.
And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong. General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life. They should be treated differently and we shoudoht allow 2 companies to monopolize and/or embargo them like Apple/Google are trying.
if everything is running on the same couple engines, the cosmetics are all compatible with each other
Unless all around the world is the usual "world === USA".
Not at all. US isn't even the leader on this. For example in many countries it's already much harder to do any kind of digital banking without a Google/Apple-approved phone than in the US.
In Europe as well, more and more places where it's completely the norm for schools and teachers to do all their communication through Facebook or Whatsapp. Sure those have web, but are arguably the worst of the three. Portugal nor most European countries are above this at all. If only they were. Look at all the national IDs rolled out, those too more and more mandatory Apple/Android 2FA.
Will Portuguese teachers never downgrade any students who do all their homework on e.g. OpenOffice and it doesn't look nice on the teacher's MS Office? Doubt it.
We have had national IDs since forever, with fingerprints, we don't go crazy about it like in some other countries, even though we suffered a dictorship with lots of human losses, colonial wars, and even though PIDE/DGS wasn't KGB or Stasi level, it also managed to impact our society.
I should know, I am part of the first generation to grow up in freedom, while hearing the grown up stories of how everything came to be.
By the way, some schools still understand emails, telephone calls, reporting books, and meetings in person.
Also, given the frequency of families having issues with the Cuco MDM used to lock out the Windows computers they handed to kids during COVID, and what kids do which such computers, I'm doubly unsure it was a smart idea to offer shitty Windows laptops vs. shitty Chromebooks.
Schools around the world give kids Chromebooks (or iPads) because they're harder to fuck and easier to unfuck. Windows still sucks at this, and no one came up with a coherent — locked down — Linux platform to achieve the same.
That kind of stuff is mostly US school system, schools in countries that go with USA into G7 meetings, or wealthy enough for that kind of stuff maybe.
Not every country has the pleasure to enjoy a school system swimming in money to offer computers to kids, in every single school.
It's possible other school districts with a less diligent, but similarly overworked, IT guy just give up and don't even hand out the computers anymore, especially if they don't have enough of them, after being on their second or third kid.
None of them has hardly an IT guy, or girl on site, and as usual "em casa de ferreiro espeto the pau", acquaitances have been invited to have a look at their computers.
Nobody gave a shit about the mobile web until Apple launched the iPhone, where one of its main selling points was a “desktop-class web browser”, where Steve Jobs told announced that if they wanted to run apps on the iPhone, they should be web apps.
Then suddenly everybody started demanding “iPhone-compatible websites” overnight. Nobody was asking for “mobile websites”, which until that point were shitty WAP/WML things, or – in the best case – cut back m.example.com microsites. People wanted “iPhone-compatible websites”.
And then all the other phone vendors used the open-source WebKit code (open-source thanks to KDE!) to release their own browsers, and the mobile web took off like a rocket because suddenly it was useful because people could use real websites.
And let’s not forget Steve Jobs telling people to avoid Flash and use open web standards instead.
There is a very clear before/after with the mobile web, and it’s the launch of the iPhone and all the work Apple put into making WebKit work well on mobile that provided that watershed moment.
Apple were championing the web in the time period you claim they were “intentionally undermining and artificially crippling it”.
Now, you may be underwhelmed by their performance in more recent years, but it’s simply factually untrue that they have had a 20 year campaign to undermine the web.
Jumping into this thread midstream, you seem to be ceding the argument.
Yes, it does. Your only options are like Fornite, Roblox, or Minecraft.
Saying make your own game, is like saying make your own phone. There is tremendous value in the gigantic userbases these platforms have. This value is why platform holders can charge for access to them.
What?? Unlike phones nothing locks people into only playing a specific game. And there are so many other games out there to choose from.
>are so many other games out there to choose from.
But how many can you make a business on top of that can pay competitively? It's like how there are a ton of operating systems to choose from, yet only a few that are viable to build upon.
Taking Fortnite as an example the relevant figure would be that creators on Fortnite can make over $10 million per year. Bringing up that Epic made a few billion dollars is irrelevant to what this conversation is about, which is building content for a game.
f you want to start a business making games then you really should consider using a game engine rather than something like Roblox because Roblox takes a massive cut (way more than 30%) when looking at what users pay vs. what you cash out. I don't
Yes, it's possible to make your own game, but it's also possible to make your own app store. There is value in being able to build on top of successful platforms. These existing app stores can demand a bigger cut than doing things yourself because they bring a lot of value and paying customers to the table.
Because games are not platforms. Roblox is a platform - games ("experiences") are all UGC. Fortnite is a game that Epic is turning into a platform. Not sure what Minecraft is doing but it doesn't seem anywhere near as financially viable for creators pas Roblox.
It's an interesting thing to think about because Roblox does not exactly follow the App Store review guidelines. Code and assets are downloaded onto your device to run the games. If you could add them to your home screen then it wouldn't be so far off from a game-specific app store.
Except there isn’t multiple stores on Xbox or PlayStation or Switch. Which is directly comparable to the iOS lock ins that Epic was fighting against.
> But more importantly, gaming isn’t an essential part of life, which is basically what smartphones, dominated entirely by iOS/Android, have become at this point.
True but also irrelevant. Monopoly laws don’t make those distinctions.
> And finally, maybe this is just me, but I think the idea that general purpose computing is the same as playing video games just strikes me as wrong.
Again, monopoly laws don’t make any distinction here. However to answer your direct point, some consoles are marketed as more general purpose devices for taxation reasons. All consoles support YouTube, most have other streaming services from Netflix to Spotify. They all come with a fully capable web browser. They literally are general purpose devices in all metrics aside from the variety of apps available. And you could argue the reason for this is literally because of their “App Store” lock ins. So your argument here is evidence against the point you’re trying to make.
> General purpose computing, which is what phones are, are basic infrastructure for modern life.
That’s not the definition of a “general purpose computing device” and I reject the idea that iOS and Android are equivalent to water, roads and electricity.
I do agree that smartphones are a MASSIVELY useful asset, but you don’t actually need a smartphone for modern life. Plenty of older people still manage just fine without iOS nor Android.
Furthermore, the companies who are fighting iOS lock ins are not critical services. Epic, for example, is a gaming company. They don’t provide health or banking services. You can’t do your taxes in Fortnight. You don’t book your car in for a service via an app built in Unreal Engine. Epic build games not essential infrastructure.
I assume by hardware margins you are thinking of component and manufacturing cost. However, the largest cost that has to be amortized over the life of a hardware product is R&D cost, which is huge.
Morality is irrelevant and criminality is for the legal system to decide, not you.
> Nintendo and Sony do not make 10% of the hardware margins that Apple does.
Which, again, is completely irrelevant.
> They are not analogous businesses.
Only because you’ve decided they’re not. And your arguments have zero citations to any legal precedence. Yet we do have legal precedence of lock ins on other platforms and their related app stores.
So the problem we have is the legal precedence actually works against Nintendo et al and now it’s up to the courts to decide if those prior judgements are relevant to Nintendo and its ilk too.
Thus far all you and your likeminded peers have proven is that you have a personal opinion. But you’ve provided precisely zero legal evidence to back up your opinions. So why should we trust your opinion any more than the highly public legal precedence that was reached between Epic and Apple?
The killer app for jailbreaking game systems is and has always been running unlicensed games, a scenario which Apple, Xbox, and Nintendo vigorously object to. It's also why Sony killed Linux on PS3. On the other hand, you can run unlicensed games on Android and it hasn't killed Google Play.
Either stick to your laws and principles and apply them to everything equally or fuck off
If phones have to be open so should consoles
If the App Store and Google Play have to be open so should the content stores for Fortnite etc. (just like DotA did)
Cry me a river for the Epics of the world selling loot boxes and other pay to win crap. It came out in the trial that 90% of App Store revenue is coming from games.
Neither Epic, Google or Apple are on the side of the angels
Guess what? Nobody cared.
“Epic has indicated that it opposes the service fees that Google announced it may implement in the future and that Epic will challenge these fees if they come into effect.”
https://www.theverge.com/news/848540/google-app-fees-externa...
Free mobile games work via whales subsidizing free users. It may be more than the median user, but it's less than the average user.
These would not be free to play. They would have an up front cost beyond what the free users would be paying otherwise.
Unless you are building a gambling game app, it's not worth it to go to the duopoly, I've been there.
- indies who mostly don't care about the 15%
- the huge corpos (Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, game studios) who want the 30% to be 0%. They're the only ones who cares about these disputes. Yawn.
Why don't they buy alternate devices without android or google?
So does this mean a malicious competitor or motivated disgruntled user could fraudulently cause millions of app installs? With the scale smartphone activity fraud farms are at these days, paying a few thousand dollars on such a service to cause a developer to spend a few million dollars on worthless installs (or a lot of resources arguing with Google) seems like a worthwhile endeavour to the motivated.
So in other words, go back to in-app purchases processed by Google.
Meanwhile they get full competitive insight into which apps are being added to Epics store, their download rates apparently, and they even get the APKs to boot, potentially making it easier for those app devs to onboard if they like, and can pressure them to do so by dragging their feet on that review process.
> Provide direct, publicly accessible customer support to end users through readily accessible communication channels.
This is an interesting requirement. I want to see someone provide the same level of support that Google does to see if it draws a ban.
(Yikes)
i do wonder if there's regardless going to be some kind of (perhaps overwhelming) inundation.
Unfortunately I can't get myself and those I care about off this planet (no, thank you, Elon) and we all will most likely lose a lot, possibly life and limb on account of this.
There is no way this ends well if it is not arrested.
That definitely tells me there's ego at play here more than anything else. Even money.
That's the unheard of part of this year. Even the most blatantly corrupt politicians know not to actively throw money into a furnace.
The fact that a couple of million (billion?) people could die as a result of their landgrab is none of their concern. The billionaire class appears to be divorced from reality to a very dangerous degree.
To become a billionaire requires sociopathic disregard for the suffering of others and a pathological need for more.
There's no such thing as a good billionaire.
If you don't realize it by two you never will. Really, this is completely out of proportion by now, Marie Antoinette was a pauper by the standards these people live by.
But the point stands.
In general their money isn't money, it's stock. The thing it buys them is being the CEO of their company instead of letting Wall St pick someone even worse.
The real problem is that companies are now so large that you'd have to be a multi-billionaire to have a controlling interest.
The list almost always reads the same on every major corporation. Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, ect... Numbers may be slightly out of date in some cases. If the Institutionals all vote together or collectively, almost none of the wealthy have "controlling amounts". (wikipedia listings)
Basically, it usually reads like "if Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street agree on anything, you lose the vote." Alphabet being somewhat exception because of the 10x special votes. Everything listed has more than $1,400,000,000,000 share cost outstanding. Even $100,000,000,000 won't buy enough.Notably, in-practice they probably usually just vote whatever one of the main founders, CEO's, ect... recommends unless there's some actual major issue.
Funnily, the next one on the list is JPMorgan and they're controlled by ... Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street... Who in turn control major portions of NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta... It's all rather incestuous and circular.
American billionaires sure do.
Its very much about centralizing power while very carefully restructuring capacities, not decentralizing power.
Instead you need to get some adults back in the room and start doing things like prosecuting government officials for corruption regardless of which party they're in, and actually enforcing antitrust laws instead of both parties whenever they're in power using them as a cudgel to get tech and media corporations to bend the knee politically in exchange for not enforcing them.
I mean I'm sympathetic; I fully support having adults back in the White House, even from above the 49th parallel. It does not, however, seem realistic.
People seem to make this mistake a lot.
People want adults back in the room because that's how they get the results they want. Now, are they currently doing the things that will cause that to happen? Obviously not. But "they" is us. There is no external "them" to delegate this to and then blame when it goes wrong. Things get done when someone does them. If you want it done then the someone is you.
That doesn't mean you can solve the entire problem yourself, but it also doesn't mean you can't make a contribution. The absence of trying is the presence of failure.
Now let's consider how we've gotten screwed in the past. The primary recent mechanism is that nobody likes how things are going, but half the country is convinced that the problem is the other half and vice versa. And then they direct their efforts into having their party "win" even though their party sucks because both parties suck. Which absorbs all the inclination people have to try to fix things and throws it into a black hole as everyone's efforts do nothing more than cancel out the efforts of their countrymen on the other team.
If you're being divided into teams then you're playing someone else's game. That makes people think the goal should be to win the game. But the goal should be to change the rules so that people with common interests aren't stuck on opposing teams.
Score voting would be a good start.
Or what's left of it...
But to do that you have to step on the toes of the banks and the National Association of Realtors and the trades unions on housing costs and the healthcare companies and the AMA on healthcare costs. Which the rest of the public wants you to do, but that's not how you get paid off, so it's not what they do.
Instead they talk a big game but when it comes time to do it, they offer up economic sophism like rent control that not only doesn't solve the problem but actually makes it worse. And then people don't like them because they suck.
So then:
> Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.
Here's the second clause of the 18th amendment (prohibition of alcohol), ratified in 1919 and repealed by the 21st:
> The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
In other words, in 1919 it was generally understood that the federal government didn't have the power to so much as prohibit alcohol, and they needed a constitutional amendment to grant that power (without withdrawing it from the states through preemption).
Most of what the federal government currently does was intended to be unconstitutional, until FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court if they didn't knuckle under and approve his unconstitutional acts, and then they did. Likewise Roe v. Wade, initiated by the Court itself in a year the left held the majority and then kept that way for half a century even though its logic was muddled and inconsistent with those same opinions they themselves wanted that said the government does have the power to regulate healthcare. Likewise gun control, which the constitution not only didn't give the federal government the power to regulate, it explicitly constrained them from regulating it.
You can think that any of these things would be good policy, but without breaking the rules to enact them you'd need to amend the constitution. So never mind 20 years, this has been going on for a lot longer than that.
But if you abandon the rules because it's expedient, and then they abandon the rules because you did, and then you abandon even more of the rules because they did, we're all going to end up in a place nobody likes.
https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/complying-w...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315033)
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