Epic already lost the trial in the Apple case. Courts in the US and other countries have treated Google differently as an OS provider to OEMs than Apple as a single vendor.

Would they also make Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft open up their platforms?

So Google is punished because they made their platform more open.

Well, that certainly will bode well for the future.

They got punished for paying companies off to not compete on their open platform

But they are the ones that allowed those companies to compete in the first place. And I'm not saying that they should have won. Both Apple and Google losing would have been the best outcome. However, Google losing and Apple winning is the worst. Because its makes open platforms even less attractive to businesses.

Unfortunately, apple’s position as both phone manufacturer, iOS manufacturer, and App Store maintainer resulted in them being able to successfully argue that their control over the App Store was a feature that was expected by users and was needed to maintain a smooth and secure operating ecosystem

Google, on the other hand, just got pilloried because they are not the phone manufacturer (for the most post), but instead were using their position as the producers of android to pressure phone manufacturers and companies to not compete. Their own internal docs showed the extreme lengths they were willing to go to stop companies from producing third party apps stores. It was this stifling of completion that just got them reamed by the court

if you zoom out you find that Google got published for allowing other manufacturers into their Android system while Apple benefited from keeping ios closed to themselves. how does this serve the consumers ultimately

Google got punished for paying off companies to not compete with the Google Play Store.

You are in this hyper dense loop of just repeating the same thing, which is adding 0 here.

It's quite literally impossible for apple to be do the same, because they've banned installing apps at all on their platform. Clearly the right move for Google would have been to do the same 15 years ago and saved themselves the headache.

Yes because we see how well that Google has been at selling hardware

Well seeing that consumers in the US prefer iOS to Android and pay more than twice as much for the privilege, may they care about different things than side loading?

No, they’re getting punished because they faced a jury instead of a judge.

It sounds like Google chose a jury, which means someone badly miscalculated how popular they were with people in SF:

https://www.wired.com/story/jury-will-decide-if-googles-play...

Google was punished for making deals to limit competition on their ‘open’ platform.

Apple doesn’t really make these deals, so they weren’t punished for that.

So Google should have never allowed competition to begin with like Apple. That doesn't seem like a great answer to me.

They did not allow competition, they made illegal deals to keep their App Store installed on other devices.

If they left it alone and all OEMs chose to keep Google play store and billing, nothing would’ve happened.

No, Google shouldn’t have given Riot Games $10m in marketing to prevent launching a competing android store, or give OEMs 20% cut of Play revenue to prevent them from bundling competing stores. Or cut a special deal with Spotify where it pays 0% while still using Play Store billing.

You mean just like Epic got special marketing deals from console manufacturers?

Right - a co-marketing deal isn’t the illegal thing. It’s the "limiting competition" part that gets them in trouble. This case was entirely about figuring out when a ‘good business deal’ becomes anti-competitive. This is also playing out now with Google paying Apple for default search engine.

If it was revealed that Sony gave Epic a special marketing deal to prevent Epic from launching a console, then yeah that would be pretty dodgy!

Epic shouldn't get special pricing either. Even Epic will say that.

Why shouldn't they?

I know for sure that if it were possible to sideload software onto my Switch or PS5, that would definitely benefit me as a consumer. The fact that I have a reasonably powerful computer attached to my TV but can't install software on it without convincing Sony to sell me a janky dev kit for way too much money is just wasteful.

Just about the only objection I can imagine is "piracy", but the locked-down nature of these platforms has surely not stopped piracy from occurring. Nor has piracy caused the failure of Valve's game store or the downfall of their gaming hardware.

If only you could buy a “powerful computer” to attach to your TV where you could download software from anywhere…

But that’s not something you get through a jury. There are no laws saying that’s necessary.

You need a new law to say that.

Google got in trouble for saying that you could do something and then secretly undermining it. Whether or not third-party app stores were allowed on devices was not the core issue.

Epic vs Apple is not over, it's being appealed to the US Supreme Court. And this Google case is likely to end up there as well.

I suspect they'll end up ruling in favor of Epic, in some limited fashion. But let's see!

Highly doubt the conservative court rules against an American company in favor or a foreign owned entity.

All three of the companies involved are American companies

> Would they also make Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft open up their platforms?

God I hope so.

It would be terrible for consoles.

They would not be able to recover their costs early enough in the lifecycle. Which means that the time between console releases would be much longer than it already is.

It also would put Nintendo in an untenable situation since they rely on low price hardware as their differentiation.

The would be the end of consoles.

At this point consoles have very few advantages to PC. If they got "opened up" it would be zero.

It's just look a lot more like a standardized PC. Which they they probably should by this point.

Sure. But there would be zero incentive for Sony, Nintendo etc to build one.

Because Acer, Asus etc could simply come along and undercut them on price and still have access to the exact same game catalog. And then they would each decide to add more proprietary features or add more performance.

And so you've just recreated the PC gaming market again.

> And so you've just recreated the PC gaming market again.

What's the issue with that?

Really? What’s the issue for not having a known target to optimize for?

That hasn't been a serious issue for 20 years. The overwhelming majority of big games are now being released for PC on day one, the only exceptions being platform exclusives and Rockstar games.

Developers certainly have no problem making PC games.

I can go to a store today and buy a Sony PS5 and know that it will play every game designed it for with the same quality as any other PS5.

Can you say the same about buying any PC? Will that be true for any game you buy for the next five years?

You’re right. I can’t wait until I can’t play games on my PlayStation because I forgot to install audio driver update 2.367 which conflicts with rendering update 7.829.

That will be a much better experience for me as a consumer.

There is no need to open up consoles. You don’t have to buy them. The PC is incredibly healthy as a gaming platform.

Please let people like me who want to gaming appliance have it without screwing it up.

Opening up a platform doesn't mean that it suddenly has to be cross-compatible with everything else. It just means that software that is written for your platform is no longer under full control of the manufacturer. Why wouldn't you want things like accessible emulators, some control over the OS, more games in general (since developers no longer have to invest thousands into licensing and proprietary software) and much more?

Besides, even if someone somehow forced, say, PlayStation to be cross-compatible with other platforms for some reason - it's not like the issues you described are exactly plaguing PCs nowadays. With very rare exceptions (like ancient or heavily modded games), the experience is pretty much "Press 'Play' on your launcher of choice -> Play game".

Perhaps Steam Deck model is actually the future of the consoles...

A beautiful future

That isn't a bad thing for customers.

I don’t think Nintendo has ever sold consoles at a per-unit loss. It would actually probably help them since it would raise the cost of Sony and Microsoft’s offerings even higher over theirs

No but they make a lot of money through licensing and Nintendo Store sales.

That would all disappear if you could side-load any content.

Does "side-load any content" mean unlimited piracy? Otherwise I don't understand your argument at all. But adding side-loading does not enable unlimited piracy.

Piracy isn't the issue here.

It's the fact that Nintendo, Sony etc wouldn't be able to enforce any licensing revenue since users could just install any game directly.

For Nintendo it would decimate the company since it's their primary revenue stream.

Nintendo makes a ton of money on first-party games, and they could easily continue releasing their games exclusively on their consoles. They'd lose very little.

Random sideloaded games are just irrelevant when people are buying the systems for Zelda and Pokemon.

> They'd lose very little

Nintendo charges 30% on the sale of every game sold.

Looking at the current best sellers [1] they would stand to lose a significant amount of money.

Easily in the billions based on current revenue.

[1] https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/games/best-sellers/#sort=d...

Look at all the games that are sold through Steam, just for convenience and stability.

I think the benefit of being in the Nintendo store is far higher than that, and they'd do fine. And they have lots of first party games too.

All I’m hearing is we’d significantly reduce ewaste and force consoles to compete to keep themselves relevant by not allowing them a monopoly.

And this is why posters on HN make horrible lawyers.

How is a market with three competitors, four if you count PCs and even more if you count phones “a monopoly”?

Btw, the judge in the Apple case said that Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in game distribution

Honestly not much different to today.

a) Apple, Google etc could just refuse to host any apps that are being sold on other stores. This sort of exclusivity is common place and legal.

b) Larger developers who have their own agendas like Epic and their metaverse will run their own stores.

c) Everyone else will stay with Apple/Google. The costs of running a third party store are significant and ultimately developers or consumers will need to pay for it. So either end users or developers will end up having to pay more for an experience that is far worse than what they have today. And if a) ends up true then developers would lose their biggest distribution channel.

For all Epic’s talk, and as much as people support third-party App Store, they only really care about their third-party App Store.

They just want to get to be the middleman instead of Apple/Google.

This seems like an enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing… be very careful supporting them. They’re not a paragon of virtue.

It looks like the world before app stores. Anybody can develop software and sell it to anyone, who can then install it on any compatible device.

You couldn't easily install software on phones before smartphone app stores; the app developer had to make a deal with individual carriers to allow it.

Not really. At least Windows Mobile and PalmOS let you install anything very easily. It was just difficult initially finding apps.

It was POSSIBLE. Was it easy enough for the average user?

I saw plenty of people who never installed anything because it was PITA.

There’s a reason the App Store revolutionized things.

Downloading an APK from a website is just as easy as installing an exe on windows from some site, and millions of barely tech-literate people do that every day

Yes and they get viruses, malware, and ransomware from doing so.

My mom searched for a printer driver and ended up installing some third party crap wars on her computer

And malware has never existed in the Google Play store, right?

The point is that if you are the owner of the device you get to choose what to do with it, not Google. If the trade off for that freedom is an increased risk of malware then so be it. The people that want to only use the Google Play store as their source of software are free to do so, that's the beauty of your device being /your/ device.

And this is why people on HN make horrible product designers

I assume by being on HN you work in the tech industry. Assuming so, you owe your career and livelihood to the openness of the systems that came before you and the people that built them. Locking everything down in the name of safety and convenience is also a great way to prevent innovation and competition.

Yes I have had computers since 1986 that I programmed and could because of their oneness. I’ve also had none open devices - my first being the Atari 5200.

I’ve also known since then that if I wanted an open device, I bought one and not complained about a device that I knew going in that I couldn’t program.

Please point me to the smartphone that I can freely do whatever I want with. For all Apple devices, it's non-existent. For Android there's only a few limited options left that ship with a bootloader that can be unlocked.

The point is that this isn't 1986 anymore and when everyone's devices are locked down it prevents competition because there's no distribution method for homebrew software. If there was no ability to install custom OSs on IBM and IBM-compatible machines we wouldn't have Linux. And if Microsoft was the gatekeeper of what websites could be displayed on IE in the 90s we wouldn't have the web in the form we know it today. So sure, you personally may be able to buy development boards specifically but when you can't get your software to the average person's device, what does that mean for adding competition to the market?

I'd much rather live in a world where being more open means there might be some malware lurking as opposed to one where everything is so locked down that I am at the mercy of what these large corporations deem acceptable for me to do on hardware that I "own" in the name of safety and security.

You said there are a “few” choices. Then you with your own free will are perfectly capable of buying one of those few devices are you not?

There is very much a choice of homebrew applications - buy one of the “few” devices you admitted existed and develop for it.

You could even buy one of the Linux phones.

> So sure, you personally may be able to buy development boards specifically but when you can't get your software to the average person's device, what does that mean for adding competition to the market?

The “average” person decided that they didn’t care about obtaining homebrew applications enough to buy such a device.

> I'd much rather live in a world where being more open means there might be some malware lurking as opposed to one where everything is so locked down that I am at the mercy of what these large corporations deem acceptable for me to do on hardware that I "own" in the name of safety and security.

And you are free to make that trade off and buy such a device.

You are completely missing the point that this is not just about an individual's ability to buy hardware that they can do what they want with, but rather two corporations (Apple and Google) locking out all competition on their respective platforms they have a duopoly on.

Your view seems to be that the free market will solve all ills then and that if this was really something so important then the average consumer would care about it and change the situation. However, 100+ years of anti-trust laws would disagree with this position. It should be fairly obvious that building a new mobile ecosystem would require an insane amount of investment to the point that it's essentially impossible now. As such, the conclusion that "everyone who cares can just buy a Linux phone" is not a viable solution as it's not feasible for a competitor trying to do that to survive long enough in the industry before being run into the ground due to the anti-competitive behavior of Apple and Google locking everyone else out of access to their operating system's users outside of their formal, approved channels.

If we relied on the average person to act in the interest of ensuring viable competition can enter a market we'd be living in the world of the early 1900s with completely vertically and horizontally integrated Standard Oil type corporations controlling every industry. Not that we're too far off from that currently unfortunately, but your view of letting the free market control who has adequate access to potential marketshare in a given industry is incredibly naive and illustrates the exact reason why we need anti-trust laws in the first place and enforcement of those laws. That's all I have to say on the matter.

Then Mom needs more training on how to differentiate between legitimate sites and non-legitimate ones.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, as many times as people need to hear it: There is no such thing as, "I'm just not a computer person!" We're over and done with that era of human history. Just like we're over and done with, "I just can't read and write!" Too bad. You live in a world were reading and writing is required just to exist. It's been that way for about 100 years, give or take depending on who you ask.

Now you need to have basic understanding of computers and the Internet. That's the world we're living in now.

And how has that worked for the last 40 years?

Well for the first couple of hundred thousand years of our existence as modern humans, we didn't teach everyone to read and write. It's been essentially the past 400 years, give or take some decades. And as it happens, it's turned out beautifully, in my estimation.

Yes we should force everyone to “learn to code” so they can disassemble the code of all of their software before they run it.

It worked pretty well.

Should we ban cars since there are people who cannot drive?

Have you really been paying attention to everything going on with the typical PC?

Not really, if you consider Symbian pre-smartphone OS.

I really meant before smartphones and the way software works on desktops/laptops.

The case is about the fees in an anti-competitive situation, not about whether or not consumers should be allowed to install their own software on these devices.

The stores can be the exact same with the fees removed and device prices hiked, afaict

You allready have 2 stores on samsung devices: goole play store and the samsung store. They both work the same. Choose an app and install it. They work like any other app...

You can also download apps from the "f droid" depository.

You can even turn on developer options and install raw apk files. Those can contain viruses. (Or more probably: are pirated)

Funny to have this discussion hacker news? I thought everyone was using side loaded apks from apkmirror when you needed an old version.