A fortnight in Fortnite court

theverge.com:

I have spent 15 days reporting live from the Epic v. Google trial: an antitrust dispute over whether Google's Android app store is an unfair monopoly. I’ve watched a parade of witnesses go by, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. We’re now in a weeklong break before both parties return on December 11th to make their closing arguments, after which a jury will decide who’s right. I’ve chronicled every major thrust, parry, and riposte leading up to that in our Verge StoryStream, writing nearly 600 dispatches from the courtroom so far.

But who’s got the time to dig through all that, am I right?

So here are straightforward versions of the 20 most interesting things we’ve learned — starting with the fact that Epic could win the whole thing.

I thought Epic was tilting at a windmill by challenging Google after losing so thoroughly to Apple. If Epic couldn’t prove Apple’s walled garden is an illegal monopoly, how could it beat the company that made Android an open-source project from the start?

The future of Google’s app store is at stakein a lawsuit by Fortnite publisher Epic Games. Epic sued Google in 2020 after a fight over in-app purchase fees, claiming the Android operating system’s Google Play Store constituted an unlawful monopoly — while Google says its demands would damage Android’s ability to offer a secure user experience and compete with Apple’s iOS.

After just over a fortnight’s worth of cumulative evidence — loosely speaking — the answer has become clear. A decade after Skyhook, Google still uses a tangled web of contracts and deals to make partners fall in line — incentivizing phone makers and the biggest app developers to share, rather than compete for, an ever-growing pile of app