Apple's policies were established when you purchased the phone. Apps come through registered developers and their vetting.
Google has changed the game on something you already own. I'm sure their lawyers have done their homework, but in some jurisdictions this is certainly actionable.
They already lost a lawsuit and were fined a hundred billion dollars in the EU for locking down Android. Maybe they think since they already lost once, they can't lose again.
Google had an open (but maybe not perfectly open) platform and is paying out billions in anti-competitive fines because of it.
None of the other platform vendors with totally closed platforms are paying out anything.
So with even a room temperature business IQ, it's pretty clear that closed platforms are the best way to do business, and court rulings in both the US and EU have affirmed this multiple times over the last decade.
Well, they can't have it both ways. They can either have the more open platform, and continue to get techies to use them as simple convenience tools, serving as advertisers of Google indirectly, or they can be more closed and not even have that initial trust.
Google could only grow like it did, because they did things differently.
Other tech giants pay fines for other crimes. For example Facebook once had to pay a record high 5 billion for violating consumers' privacy. It is not surprising, that different companies with different products pay fines for different things.
They are paying fines for trying to close their open platform. Microsoft isn't because their platform is still open enough, and Apple isn't because it was always closed and everyone who bought it knew it was closed.
This is the remediation to that case and therefore has already been run by the EU. Notably, Apple did not get fined for the way they run their ecosystem which is far more locked down.
Hundred billion would be a quarter's revenue, that can't be right. The lasest I've read is a threat of a fine of around 500mil wrt app store issues back in December, but nothing has been decided yet.
No, you're still allowed to install whatever apps you want, whether they're verified or not, from the system app stores or not. What developer verification brings is the ability to install apps outside the system app stores without a warning, as required by the antitrust judgment against Google.
People here are complaining about a separate thing, which is that the process for installing an app outside a blessed way is changing, becoming harder for the first such installation and easier for subsequent installations on new devices.
