Linked List: December 11, 2023

Monday, 11 December 2023

My thanks to Obsidian for sponsoring last week at DF. Obsidian is a remarkably flexible and powerful writing and note-taking app that is designed to adapt to the way you think. Obsidian helps you create connections and links between your notes so you can organize your thoughts. You can create links between everything — ideas, articles, lists, locations, books — anything you can put in a note, you can link to other notes.

Obsidian’s guiding principles:

Free for personal use
Available on all operating systems
Interoperable, local Markdown files
No tracking, no account required
Private, end-to-end encrypted
Easy to modify with API, plugins, and themes
100% user-supported, no VC funding

Obsidian exemplifies the mindset of a proper power-user tool: it makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. It’s also the sort of Markdown-based tool that does things with Markdown that I never would have imagined when I created it.

They’re offering a special deal for DF readers: sign up for their optional add-on sync service, Obsidian Sync, by 1 January 2024 and you’ll get 5 times the storage space — 50 GB for the price of 10 GB. Get started simply by downloading Obsidian for free.

Secret Deal With Google Allows Spotify to Completely Bypass Play Store Payment Fees ★

Adi Robertson and Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge three weeks ago:

Music streaming service Spotify struck a seemingly unique and highly generous deal with Google for Android-based payments, according to new testimony in the Epic v. Google trial. On the stand, Google head of global partnerships Don Harrison confirmed Spotify paid a 0 percent commission when users chose to buy subscriptions through Spotify’s own system. If the users picked Google as their payment processor, Spotify handed over 4 percent — dramatically less than Google’s more common 15 percent fee.

Google fought to keep the Spotify numbers private during its antitrust fight with Epic, saying they could damage negotiations with other app developers who might want more generous rates. [...]

But Harrison says Spotify’s “unprecedented” popularity was great enough to justify a “bespoke” deal. “If we don’t have Spotify working properly across Play services and core services, people will not buy Android phones,” Harrison testified. As part of the deal, both parties also agreed to commit $50 million apiece to a “success fund.”

When this was first reported last month, I installed Spotify on my Pixel phone and tried it myself. Not only does Spotify on Android default to using its own in-app purchasing system — giving not a penny to Google in fees, apparently — but I couldn’t even find a way to choose to pay using the Play Store system. Google has granted Spotify a complete exemption to any sort of payment fee, and Spotify simply uses its own in-app payment processing.

On iOS, needless to say, Spotify has no such exemption. I just checked, and all Spotify does on iOS is list the features of each Premium account tier, with a message under each tier that reads “You can’t upgrade to Premium in the app. We know, it’s not ideal.” They don’t even list the prices or tell you where to go to sign up.

So I don’t really buy the argument that Spotify’s “unprecedented” popularity forced Google to offer this secret sweetheart deal. It doesn’t even make sense. Harrison’s argument is that Google had to offer Spotify this complete exemption from the regular Play Store payment processing rules because otherwise ... Spotify would have to do the same thing on Android that they do on iOS? It beggars belief that Spotify would pull its app from the Play Store. What makes more sense is that Google wanted to get Spotify — an EU-based company — off their backs as vocal critics of their app store policies, so they offered them this sweetheart deal to shut them up. But it sounds like these sweetheart deals, offered only to large companies like Spotify, are part of what led the jury to rule in Epic’s favor in the Epic v. Google lawsuit.

Jury Rules for Epic Games in Lawsuit Against Google ★

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge:

Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly.

The jury unanimously answered yes to every question put before them — that Google has monopoly power in the Android app distribution markets and in-app billing services markets, that Google did anticompetitive things in those markets, and that Epic was injured by that behavior. They decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug deals with game developers and deals with OEMs were all anticompetitive. [...]

Mind you, we don’t know what Epic has actually won quite yet — that’s up to Judge James Donato, who’ll decide what the appropriate remedies might be. Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes.

It’s certainly big news that Epic won, but as Hollister makes clear, we have no idea what this will actually mean in practice. I’m still not quite sure what Epic even wants. Android already supports third-party app stores, and Epic already runs one. I think one thing Epic wants is to force Google to allow third-party app stores to be installed without any sort of warnings or friction, which would be a disaster for device security. I’ve installed the Epic Games app on Android, and the installation and permission-granting process seems perfectly reasonable to me. It just isn’t popular.

The other thing Epic wants is to be able to use its own payment processing for apps distributed through the Play Store and Apple’s App Store. Implementing such a payment circumvention scheme was what got them kicked out of both stores back in 2021.

Apple Updates Law Enforcement Guidelines to Require a Judge’s Approval Before Handing Over Push Notification Records ★

After Senator Ron Wyden broke the news last week that law enforcement agencies were surveilling people by obtaining their push notification records from Apple and Google, I noted, with disapproval, that Apple required only a subpoena to turn such records over, whereas Google required a subpoena subject to court oversight. Apple has now updated its guidelines, and now requires a search warrant:

The Apple ID associated with a registered APNs token and associated records may be obtained with an order under 18 U.S.C. §2703(d) or a search warrant.

This is good.