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I don’t care about Epic at all, but this is a good thing in my opinion. These app stores are too influential of a distribution platform in the modern era to be controlled by a single party with total impunity.
If it works like it did with Steam and the Epic Game Store Epic will design a really, really shitty alternative store, then give away free stuff for ages and wonder why nobody wants to use their total piece of crap.
Perhaps we now can get f-droid on the playstore, so people get access to safe and secure apps without ads.
F-droid just has regular apps you find in the play store doesn’t it? Wouldn’t that made it illegal?
F-Droid builds its own copies of apps, and sometimes strips features that are incompatible with their rules at build time. For example, Firefox on F-Droid is called Fennec because of Mozilla’s rule about how their branding may be distributed.
So at minimum, they are different builds of the same app, but frequently there are actual, tangible differences.
Oh okay got it. I usually pirated and then sometimes bought the apps up front back in the days. Nowadays I only use android for handheld emulation, nothing else.
No, that’s the likes of apkpure/aptoide.
Then again, as long as the store version comes with clean repositories only, there’s no legal issue. If you then add unknown sources with unknowingly sourced apps it’s up to you
Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes.
So they’re going to ask for that and Google will reply “that has always been possible, look at F-Droid”.
Iirc this is phrased in a slightly misleading way. What they actually want is apps on the play store to be allowed to use their own billing system. And they want to be allowed to offer alternative store apps on the play store.
Android itself or more precise AOSP is open source and of course anyone can do anything with it. This is about what is or isn’t allowed in the context of google app ecosystem that comes with 99.9% of all devices running android.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down.
Mind you, we don’t know what Epic has actually won quite yet — that’s up to Judge James Donato, who’ll decide what the appropriate remedies might be.
Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes.
Both parties will meet with Judge Donato in the second week of January to discuss potential remedies.
Judge Donato has already stated that he will not grant Epic’s additional request for an anti-circumvention provision “just to be sure Google can’t reintroduce the same problems through some alternative creative solution,” as Epic lead attorney Gary Bornstein put it on November 28th.
We’ll replace it with the final signed form once we have access to a digital copy.
The original article contains 492 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Wonder if google’s moves on playtesting req’s - requiring testing teams of 20 or more users - is going to be a way to assert the play store is safe/well curated etc…
either way shit’s gonna get worse for indie devs :|
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
great. give rocket league some love now, please.
