News
Major blow to Apple, Google is Next: Ending App Store and Play Store monopoly
On September 10, 2021, U.S. Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers came to a conclusion of Apple vs Epic Games and issued an injunction to Apple. What is it? Well, Apple can no longer restrict developers to use its exclusive in-app purchase system. This means, they can now, use their own in-app purchase system, which is a huge win for developers across the world and a major blow to Apple.
As an app distributor, Apple takes from 15% to 30% profit of an app’s digital goods sales. The decision also put an end to the long-standing battle between app developers and Apple, which will further allow them to implement their own payment gateway on their apps on App Store.
Interestingly, App makes a huge sum of profit from this developer fee, and in 2020, it was respected that Apple made over $64 billion USD solely from App Store. Not only that but the result and the effect of this latest decision reflects on Apple stock, which dropped over 2 percent on Friday.
Curbing Competition:
This latest development in the court also highlights how the App Store platform is monopolized against developers and helps to curb competition. Apple won platform won on nine out of 10 counts but was found guilty according to anticompetitive conduct under California law.
Therefore, the law decided to force the change on App Store policies and ordered the tech maker to approach soft on in-app purchases from December 2021.
“The Court concludes that Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice,” Rogers wrote. “When coupled with Apple’s incipient antitrust violations, these anti-steering provisions are anticompetitive and a nationwide remedy to eliminate those provisions is warranted.”
“Given the trial record, the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws,” Rogers wrote.
On the other hand, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney made comment on the ruling, saying the ruling isn’t a win for developers or for consumers. Epic is fighting for fair competition among in-app payment methods and app stores for a billion consumers.
Apple Vs Epic:
Epic Games, an American video game and software developer, is well known for its games and the game engine. The company has developed and distributed Fortnite, one of the most famous online multi-play games.
The game offers V-bucks, the in-game currency to purchase costumes and other in-game products. The consumer needs to purchase V-bucks using real currency, and the entire purchase part is handled by Apple’s payment system.
Epic wasn’t seeking money from Apple, instead, it wanted to be allowed to install its own app store on iPhones, which would let it bypass Apple’s cut and impose its own fees on games.
This is where a clash began between the two companies, in August 202, Epic Games updated Fortnite on its servers to reduce the price of V Bucks by 20 percent if players purchase this currency directly through Epic Games’ payment system.
This bypasses Apple’s own payment system and its fee cut. In the aftermath, Apple removed Fortnite from App Store and due to the outdated software support, the app stopped working on iPhones. This scenario brought Epic’s subsequent lawsuit against Apple.
Epic and Google and Play Store:
Aside from Apple, Epic has also filed legal action against Google over the same issue on Play Store. Similar to Apple, the same fate could decide for Google.
Back on July, 36 U.S. states sued Google for its bad practices over Play Store Monopoly. The lawsuit claims that Google is keeping other developers out of competition in the application market, what we’ve saw on Apple App Store.
The Assistant Attorney General at Utah, Western United States files the antitrust lawsuit to challenge Google in the California central court. The plaintiff namely includes the following main provinces, who are leading the case at the moment.
- Washington, DC
- Utah
- North Carolina
- Tennessee
- New York
- Arizona
- Colorado
- Iowa
- Nebraska
The plaintiff accused Google to seek 30% commission sale revenue from the developer who wants to list their app on the Google Play Store via a new policy. Furthermore, it’s reported that Google plans to apply this new policy in September 2021, also forcing the developers to use solely Google Payment System for any transaction being made on Play Store.
The lawsuit claims, Google’s 90% market share in the Android app market was made possible by its deal with smartphone makers, which agrees to put Google services as default for the consumers.
The company didn’t plan to stop here, it also spent billions of dollars from its annual advertising revenue to spend on smartphone manufacturers, network carriers, and browsers to make Google their default search engine.
It’s mandatory for the developers to use Google’s online transaction methods to include any in-app purchase in their app on Play Store. It might help Google to keep a track of transaction records of digital goods.
ChatGPT is a raging storm on the internet and everyone is talking about this AI-powered instant reply software but Huawei says, it has long mastered such technology.
A person in charge of Huawei’s computing product section said that Huawei began to have a layout in the large model in 2020. In the following year, Huawei launched Pengcheng Pangu, which is a super-large model and the first of its kind in the industry.
This model can generate 100 billion levels of processes and can generate responses or understand Chinese natural language processing as well as speech recognition.
To be mentioned, Pangu NLP large model was the world’s largest Chinese language pre-training model with 100 billion parameters at that time. The sample tuning of the data improves the application performance of the model in the scenario.
Patent:
Recently, two patents have surfaced on China’s intellectual property office, which reveal Huawei’s use of AI in instant reply software. However, we can say that Huawei has already applied a lot of AI software to human conversation technology, which was way ahead of ChatGPT. But Huawei has not revealed any plans to implement such tech in Huawei devices.
ChatGPT:
ChatGPT was launched as a prototype on November 30, 2022, and quickly garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers across many domains of knowledge. Its uneven factual accuracy, however, was identified as a significant drawback. Following the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s valuation was estimated at US$29 billion.
Read more here – Huawei patent new ChatGPT like reply software
After the events of the U.S. ban, Huawei had to reduce its capacity of building new smartphones, which result in low yield and sales, and now, Xiaomi claims that it took over 50 million of Huawei’s users.
During the Xiaomi Investment Day, Lu Weibing, President of Xiaomi Group said that Huawei has lost over 80 million smartphone users, of which, Xiaomi took over 50 million.
This is quite a big statement made by the head of the Chinese phone maker as Huawei was forced to leave the market due to the restrictions on manufacturing.
After not meeting the market requirements the share of Huawei’s smartphone market declined severely in both the Chinese and global markets. While other smartphone makers are the ones that got most of the benefits.
From the rest, Apple took over 20 million users and Honor grabbed 10 million, which accounts for an overall 80 million Huawei users.
According to the data revealed by Canalys, the global smartphone market ranked Samsung first and Apple second, which has increased by 22 percent and 19 percent respectively. While Xiaomi declined to 13 percent.
Aside from Apple and Samsung, other smartphone maker has declined. On this matter, Xiaomi’s president said that the decline in his firm is related to various reasons such as currency depreciation, chips from shortage to surplus, and intensified competition, the global mobile phone market will decline by 12% in 2022, of which the Chinese market will decline by 13%.
Why not?
It was an opportunity for all of the smartphone companies with an open opportunity to grab Huawei’s market share and it fell directly into their lap without doing anything.
(via – CNMO)
Turkey is underway a massive rescue operation and Huawei has raised a hand of help for the country to overcome the earthquake that has taken the lives of thousands of innocent people. During this time, Huawei has provided components, generators, and mobile base stations to help eliminate communication issues in earthquake-affected areas.
On Monday, Turkey is hit by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, destroying homes and leaving thousands wounded and homeless. As of today, over 17000 people had died in Turkey, surpassing the record of the last decade in the country. This earthquake has now made its place in the most deadly disasters of the century surpassing the 2011 tsunami in Japan.
