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”.
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?
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
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.
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.
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great. give rocket league some love now, please.
I loved Rocket League - it’s my 2nd most played game on Steam - but honestly that game died for me the moment they took the irregular shaped maps out of rotation to appease the whiny eSports players.
Now it’s just the same shit every match with a slightly different skin. They’ve got all these different modifiers (gravity, ball size, shape and bounciness) and game modes (hockey, basketball, dropshot), yet none of it gets integrated into the main game.
I’m aware that might just be me, and given how many years it’s been since that change, I imagine most of the user base is perfectly fine with how it is now, but it definitely lost its quirkiness from the early days.
You might enjoy the rocket lab mode. Used to be a limited time mode, but I think it’s permanent now.
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 :|
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