I was about to swap to android from iphone after over a decade before this news started coming out

Another article that uses the misnomer “sideloading.” It’s just regular installing of apps, away from google’s garden store.

Most narratives are coined by the news and corporate people, like “review bombing” is. Narrative is important, because how you say something is more important than what is being said, because perception is at a glance is powerful.

However, Google can still take a service fee on transactions completed with alternative payment methods. For in-app and linked purchases in games, Google can charge a fee of up to 20% for purchases that “impact game outcomes, gameplay progress rate, or player power,” as well as for purchases with “random outcomes” (i.e., loot boxes).

What the hell even was the point then for Epic fighting this. “Oh yea you can use an alternate store and use an alternate payment system, FYI we are still charging you the google service fee”

Like sure 20% is less than 30% but like, google isn’t involved the number should be 0%

Also the fact that google required a time-frame(3 years) on how long it has to be before they are allowed to pay other stores to not put their store on the device… I feel like Epic’s entire fight was just a way to piss money away, only thing it really accomplished was a fake image of software freedom and a control to add even more restrictions in place.

I think our only hope soon will be that the change is easy to patch out AND that downstream distributors care to remove it. Though I personally doubt they’ll be touching anything that isn’t related to the UI.