It seems the reasoning is that Google isn't really competing against the iOS app store, in which sense they don't look much like a monopoly, but just against all the potential other android app stores, in which sense they do look a lot like a monopoly. Seems sort of ironic that Apple avoided this argument by just not having any alternative app stores at all to be anticompetitive with.

It's more nuanced than that. Apple successfully argued that the combination hardware+software experience of iOS and its app store is "the product", since people don't buy iOS for e.g. what bootloader it uses, but rather the wide ranging ecosystem experience and the apps that Apple certifies and verifies through a "feature" of "the product". Without such tight integration of the hardware and software, the product loses immense value to both consumers and developers.

Android being open actually made its own point of being "an OS with other products [app stores] running on top of it".

So the walled garden model won against the (almost) open backyard model?

The open model has won more openness, which is good for open models

But bad for incremental opening of things. It isn't like Apple will see this and think "oh, I want to to happen to me as well!".

The way I’m reading it is that your platform needs to be totally open, desktop-OS-style, or manufactured as a single piece iOS/console style. Anything between those two is where the trouble comes in.

Isn't this just as simple as: if you claim to be open/allow something (alternative stores) you can't then do back room deals to prevent competition with them.

As someone else said: Google wants to make big loud claims about android being "open" but also wants to prevent anyone from competing with them.

But most people don't care much about those claims. If the end result is "Google stops claiming to be open", that's a terrible outcome.

It's not about whether most people care, it's about competitors taking Google at their word and putting in the effort to make a competing store, only to get materially harmed when Google makes these backroom deals.

Nobody's making a third party app store on iOS because apple says "we allow it" so nobody's harmed when apple requires exclusivity to exist on their App Store.

The list of companies that put in serious effort to make a competing store and would have been materially harmed by deals like this is very small. And many were the recipients of these deals.

If this ruling is about helping them, then that makes the outlook even worse for consumers.

Well I guess in a scenario where Google decides to stop working with other hardware vendors and just makes their own phones running their own software, their existing hardware partners will have three options: exit the phone business; continue using something forked/continued from the android core as it is "now"; or move their phones to a separate platform (ie webos, or... Samsung had one too, tizen?)

Unless every single existing android vendor stops making phones, the result is more actual competition.

They don't have to stop working with other vendors to stop being open.

That depends entirely on how you define "being open".

To me what is open about the android platform is that it's used (and even customised) by multiple vendors.

The openness that the lawsuit was about, in particular. Primarily the ability to add other stores.

If they stop promising to allow anything beyond the Play store, you can't sue them for breaking the promise.

But that's the point: Google don't have complete control the "Android" that ends up on other vendor's devices. So Even if Google says "we won't allow other stores on <Google brand> phones", that doesn't prevent Samsung/etc from enabling it in their own customised builds.

They can stop allowing customized builds, except from forks of the old open source code with no gmail, no google maps, no play services, no play store, no youtube.

Which is what I said above:

> continue using something forked/continued from the android core as it is "now"

It seems quite unlikely that vendors like Samsung would just give up on their customisations.

That's not google being open though, so I feel like this line of conversation got mixed up somewhere.

Anyway, yes Samsung could do that, but do you think they value their custom apps more than youtube access?

Let's assume Google will still allow UI customizations. So Samsung can keep 75% of their work either way, the choice is between the remaining 25% or access to the Google ecosystem.

> That's not google being open though

Part of what makes Android "open" is that it's available to other hardware vendors to use.

> do you think they value their custom apps more than youtube access?

I don't know - Google seem pretty happy to put a YouTube app on the iPhone, where they have zero control over the App Store, and the reason is obvious: for everything they start, and eventually abandon, eyeballs are Google's primary business metric. Do you really think they'd deliberately cut themselves off from ~25% of all mobile customers worldwide?

Restricting the play store is one thing, I doubt it's even a drop in the bucket for Google profits, and it obviously gives them some degree of control.

I don't see them playing so fast and loose with the ability to view YouTube. It's like suggesting they would block access to Google search for non-Google "android" devices. The whole reason Android exists is to drive more eyeballs to Google services.

Whether Android is open, as a separate thing from Google, has very little to do with whether Google gets sued though.

> Do you really think they'd deliberately cut themselves off from ~25% of all mobile customers worldwide?

When it's specifically about forking Android, and looking at how badly they've been pushing things behind closed doors, I think they'd play pretty hard ball.

It's not the first time Google has been paradoxically punished for being more open than Apple. When you have partners and competitors then there are a lot of people to argue against you in court. When you forbid competition and partner with nobody then the people harmed are the theoretical partners and competitors you would have had, but theoretical people don't show up in court.

Exactly. Epic actually created a third party store on Android, and then Google abused their monopoly position and colluded with phone manufacturers to hurt Epic's store. Apple just didn't allow them to create a store at all.

Your last sentence almost gets the point: Apple never claimed iOS is an open platform open, nor made it available to other hardware vendors to use as they wish.

This isn't Google being "punished for being more open" it's punishing them for claiming to be open and then doing a heap of hidden deals to prevent competition.

The point is that what Apple did is as bad or worse from the perspective of promoting competition in healthy markets, but it's more difficult to prove and quantify the harm, so it doesn't get punished.

On one of the platforms it was possible for epic to make a third party app store, and on another it wasn't.

That alone should tell any sane person which platform was 'worse'. It's absolutely wild and a failing of our legal system somewhere that the company with the worst effect actually won their own case.

One company was honest about what their platform allows and disallows. You might not like how they choose to run it, but they did what they said.

Another company made claims about their platform (both to end users and to business partners) being "open" and then acted directly counter to those claims, in efforts to prevent competition.

Google was really a victim of their own success. By making Android an open platform, they increased adoption by smartphone OEMs, but on the flip side it made them liable in this very specific case.

It’s optional to use your position as the OS developer to squash other app stores.

I think the ruling is more about saying Google did the wrong thing, not Apple did the right thing.

We learned in the Epic v. Apple trial that Apple cut sweetheart deals with Netflix and other companies as well. Am I missing how this is different?

Yes. Unlike Google, the deals Apple were making weren’t for the purposes of undermining competing app stores

But, that's a false premise. Apple doesn't allow competing app stores.

Which is precisely why Apple couldn’t have been making deals for the purpose of undermining competing app stores.

However, Apple's deals were for the purpose of undermining competing payment systems.

They weren’t, because Apple does not allow competing payment systems.

They do just not directly in-app. Many apps only allow subscription via the web. Namely Netflix and Amazon.

You mean like Epic cut with console makers for co-marketing dollars or like every company does with large customers?

I’ve got news for you - AWS also cut special deals with AWS, Spotify with GCP and OpenAI with Azure.

Do you really think large comoanirs get the same deals as the creator of random Indy app maker?

What are you even talking about and how is it relevant to what I'm asking? You seem to be leaping to Apple's defense as if you're taking a bullet for them but it isn't really necessary here.

I am saying that everyone makes deals with preferred customers and volume sellers. If you think you’re going to get the same pricing when you open an AWS account that Netflix gets you’re naive.

There has never been a law that a company has to make the same deals with everyone

If finding out that keeping rival app stores down was what was necessary for Google to lose, shouldn't Apple lose by the same token? And I don't think intention is part of the three-step burden shifting framework last I checked in any event.