Legally, yes. Dictating the rules for software on your own hardware is entirely legal, and extremely common.
Using your market position to dictate a cabal of other manufacturers’ rules on their hardware is anticompetitive. They’re using their market dominance with the play store to mandate a variety of hardware decisions and software decisions.
That’s incorrect. There are multiple requirements, both hardware and software, to be able to ship with the play store. That’s the monopoly they’re abusing, and that’s what Epic is suing for.
One example (of many) where their requirements have directly impacted the growth of a market is refresh rate. Android ereaders are excellent devices, but because of Google’s arbitrary limitations, devices until recently (when the technology they impeded with their monopoly developed far enough to meet that restriction) were forced to require users to jump through multiple extremely convoluted hoops to enable the play store.
This made them almost entirely inaccessible to normal end users and almost certainly played a huge role in the availability of options. That’s textbook anticompetitive.
It’s not the only restriction, just the first to come to mind.
The play store is their monopoly that they abuse. There’s a refresh rate requirement to distribute your device with the play store.
Otherwise, the user has to go to a Google website page from the device, sign into a Google account, and copy paste serial information of the device in order to be allowed to install the store. That’s not something normal customers can do, and it massively impeded the growth of the Android reader space.
deleted by creator
Legally, yes. Dictating the rules for software on your own hardware is entirely legal, and extremely common.
Using your market position to dictate a cabal of other manufacturers’ rules on their hardware is anticompetitive. They’re using their market dominance with the play store to mandate a variety of hardware decisions and software decisions.
deleted by creator
That’s incorrect. There are multiple requirements, both hardware and software, to be able to ship with the play store. That’s the monopoly they’re abusing, and that’s what Epic is suing for.
deleted by creator
One example (of many) where their requirements have directly impacted the growth of a market is refresh rate. Android ereaders are excellent devices, but because of Google’s arbitrary limitations, devices until recently (when the technology they impeded with their monopoly developed far enough to meet that restriction) were forced to require users to jump through multiple extremely convoluted hoops to enable the play store.
This made them almost entirely inaccessible to normal end users and almost certainly played a huge role in the availability of options. That’s textbook anticompetitive.
It’s not the only restriction, just the first to come to mind.
deleted by creator
The play store is their monopoly that they abuse. There’s a refresh rate requirement to distribute your device with the play store.
Otherwise, the user has to go to a Google website page from the device, sign into a Google account, and copy paste serial information of the device in order to be allowed to install the store. That’s not something normal customers can do, and it massively impeded the growth of the Android reader space.
deleted by creator