Epic, the company behind the Unreal Engine and infinite money machine Fortnite, are yet again suing Google. Having recently won against Google in an anti-competitive practices suit, the games company is doing it all over again, this time dragging in Samsung in a suit over the way their tech allegedly goes out of its way to discourage the installation of third-party software.
In 2023, Epic successfully convinced a jury that Google’s prevention of allowing alternative app stores on its devices was anti-competitive, and as a result the Epic Game Store (EGS) is now an app—as of August this year—you can install on your Android devices, worldwide. (Meanwhile, European iOS gamers can now play Fortnite et al on their mobile devices, while the U.S. and rest-of-world still cannot.)
The new case focuses on just what a massive pain in the ass it is to achieve what’s now legally enforced. If you’ve tried to install the Epic Game Store on any Android device, you’ll know you get told there are settings you have to change to allow external, “unapproved” .apk files to install, then go digging for them, before then being warned how dangerous it all is. And if you’ve tried to do it on Samsung, as I so recently did when trying to put Fortnite on my son’s Samsung tablet, you’ll know it also involves the tearing out of a considerable amount of hair.
It’s this process that has brought Epic to sue once more. According to a report by The Verge, Epic alleges that a month before it was able to make its store available, Samsung battened down the hatches to put its “Auto Blocker” on by default during installation, adding a flight of extra steps to the process of installing unapproved apps. As I found out myself, in a coffee shop, after thinking I’d be able to surprise the boy with Fortnite on his tablet when he’d left his Switch at home.
Epic has laid out how to disable Auto Blocker on its website, but you only learn you need to do this after Samsung throws up a message saying it won’t install the EGS, without the traditional link to the section of the device’s settings to change it. In my situation, I was then using the Samsung-infected version of the Android settings menu to search for the option (a feature that’s usually so useful) and it acted as though it didn’t exist. I ended up having to separately Google the process, and then do battle with an extra layer of complication—Google Family Link’s protections that prevent my son from installing things without my permission, which in this particular case forced me to go deep into Link’s settings on my own device to find the things to disable—by which point I was already really annoying my kid whose tablet I’d taken away.
(Don’t judge me or him. My son and I have a tradition that every Saturday, after his swimming lesson and before his tennis lesson, we visit this lovely coffee place and goof on our tablets for 45 minutes.)
So what’s in all this for Google and Samsung? Well, the reason Epic kicked off in the first place was Google’s claimed anti-competitive practice of forcing all third-party developers to provide or sell their apps through Google Play. As a result, 30 percent of transaction fees, including in-game payments, went directly to Google, a hefty tithe for their services. Epic, and many others, wanted not to have to lose nearly a third of all the mobile income to another party when it had store services of its own.
On the other hand, Google and other mobile OS providers would argue that allowing a user to install any .apk they downloaded from the internet is a massive security issue, and the easiest way for malevolent software to find its way onto phones. The default blocking of such an action is, such companies will argue, to protect the device owner. Epic’s claim, however, is that this blocking is so cumbersome and difficult to reverse that it amounts to being anti-competitive to non-Play-sold apps.
Verge reports that Epic’s new legal filing describes the so-called safety features as nonsense, saying, “Auto Blocker conducts no assessment of the safety or security of any specific source or any specific app before blocking an installation.” CEO Tim Sweeney states that it’s “not designed to protect against malware, which would be a completely legitimate purpose,” but “designed to prevent competition.”
However, Sweeney later admitted that he’s currently got no proof at all of these issues causing Epic material harm, especially given the EGS is now installed on 10 million Android devices. He also currently has no evidence of any collusion between Google and Samsung, but hopes that it’ll come out during discovery, and says he didn’t ask Samsung to just make the EGS an approved, whitelisted app—but as ever argues this is because he’s not trying to win for Epic specifically, but all developers in their position.
Still, all this could suddenly seem very small fry when we finally hear Judge Donato’s final ruling on how he’ll respond to Google’s loss from December—something that’s overdue already. It’s possible he could rule something as dramatic as Google having to allow third-party app stores to entirely replace Google’s Play store, with access to selling all the same apps Play offers. “We’re going to tear the barriers down,” another Verge story reports the judge as saying, “it’s just the way it’s going to happen.”
If that happens, Epic won’t be worrying themselves with Samsung’s frustrating .apk installation settings!
Oh, and the punchline? After I’d finally got EGS installed, and then fought against the tablet again to let EGS download its own apps, it turned out his tablet wasn’t powerful enough to run Fortnite. Worst dad ever.
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