Android app makers suing to stop Google from siphoning up to 30 percent of their sales received little reassurance about their chances as a judge allowed a comparable fee charged by Apple to stand.
Android app makers suing to stop Alphabet’s Google from siphoning up to 30 percent of their sales received little reassurance about their chances on Friday as a judge allowed a comparable fee charged by Apple Inc to stand. Developers including » Fortnite » maker Epic Games in the last year took aim at the two biggest mobile app stores, run by Apple and Google. The critics view the fee as needlessly high, costing developers collectively billions of dollars a year, and a function of the two big tech companies having monopoly power. Google’s trial is at least a year away, time both sides could use to hone arguments based on the Apple decision, legal experts said. In a ruling on Friday following a trial between Epic Games and Apple, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers required Apple to let developers tell customers about ways to pay outside of its App Store, leading Apple shares to fall 3.3 percent. Alphabet dropped 1.9 percent. Google’s Play store employs rules similar to the ones struck down in the Apple case, limiting developer communications with their customers, and Tom Forte, an analyst at DA Davidson, said Google could be at risk, too.
