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August 20, 2021 02:44 pm

Google Gave Phone Makers Extra Money To Ditch Third-Party App Stores

A newly unredacted sections of Epic's antitrust complaint against Google reveal new details on the lengths to which Google went to undermine third-party app stores on the Android platform. From a report: According to the new text, starting in 2019, Google ran a "Premier Device Program" that gave Android phone makers a greater share of search revenue than they would normally receive. In exchange, the OEMs agreed to ship their devices without any third-party app stores preinstalled. Specifically, they followed a rule that prohibited "apps with APK install privileges" without Google's approval, leaving the Play Store as the only built-in digital marketplace for software. As noted by Leah Nylen, products that qualified as a Premier Device would receive a 12 percent share of Google search revenue compared to the 8 percent they'd normally earn. Google sweetened the deal further for companies like LG and Motorola, offering them between 3 and 6 percent of what customers spent in the Google Play Store on their devices. "Google's Premier Device Program was not publicly known, and was not known to Epic, before Google recently began producing relevant documents in this litigation," Epic's lawyers wrote in the complaint. "Google has sought to conceal its most restrictive anticompetitive conduct by, among other things, including in the agreements themselves a provision restricting signatories from making 'any public statement regarding [the] Agreement without the other party's prior written approval.'"

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Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/b_qPzuiTmx0/google-gave-phone-makers-extra-money-to-ditch-third-party-app-stores

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