Google convinces court that opening Android to alternative app stores is dangerous

Google yesterday asked the appeals court to suspend the changes, which the previous instance judge, James Donato, who heard the Epic Games case, insists on. The search giant made the same request to Judge Donato himself, but he will only be able to suspend his decision on Friday, October 18.

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The decision, which the company appealed, will force it to allow the distribution of third-party application stores through its own Play Store, abandon the requirement to use only the Google payment system on its site, and take many other measures. It comes into force on November 1. But repeating its own arguments, which Judge Donato rejected as “insufficient,” Google insists its order “threatens Google Play’s ability to provide users with a safe and secure experience.”

«”This will not only hurt Google; it will have negative consequences for Android users, developers and device manufacturers who have built thriving businesses on Android,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of operations, said in a statement released to the media. affairs of regulatory authorities. The document consists of five sections, the headings below give a sense of Google’s arguments.

• «Forcing Google to distribute third-party app stores on Google Play would harm security and privacy.
• Allowing hundreds of third-party Android app stores to access the Google Play catalog would reduce developer control over app distribution and put users at risk.
• Links from Google Play apps to external app downloads are dangerous.
• Removing Play billing as an option reduces important security controls and features that users rely on.
• “Rushing the rollout of legal protections will increase the threat to users, developers and device manufacturers.”

This is how the document begins: “At the request of one competitor, Epic Games, a district court has ordered a massive overhaul of Play that will expose more than 100 million Android device users in the United States to significant new security risks and force fundamental changes to Google’s contractual and business relationships. with hundreds of thousands of Google partners. The court gave Google just three weeks to implement many of these sweeping changes—a daunting task that poses an unacceptable risk of security disruptions to the Android ecosystem.”