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Google will reimburse developers $90 million to settle a lawsuit over Play Store earnings

Google said Thursday it will pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit with U.S. developers that accused Google of abusing its power of app distribution and charging an unfair fee of 30% for app purchases and in-app purchases made through the Play Store.
The company noted that U.S. developers who made less than $2 million each year between 2016 and 2021 through Google Play Store earnings will be eligible for compensation.
“A vast majority of US developers who earned revenue through Google Play will be eligible to receive money from this fund if they choose. If the Court approves the settlement, developers that qualify will be notified and allowed to receive a distribution from the fund,” the search giant noted in a blog post.
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, the legal firm that represented the plaintiffs, said that developers were entitled to a minimum compensation of $250 — with some settlements going above $200,000. The firm noted that more than 48,000 U.S. developers are eligible for payment by Google.
The plaintiffs originally filed the case against Google in 2020 in California alleging that the company gained a monopoly in the Android app distribution space “through a series of anticompetitive contracts, strategic abuses of its dominance in other Android software applications, deficits in consumer knowledge and information, and the cultivation and exploitation of device users’ fear of malware.” The case document also harped upon the fact that Google had a default 30% Play Store tax for developers on the sale of apps or in-app purchases.
To handle the criticism on the 30% Play Store tax, in 2021, Google slashed its cut to 15% on the first $1 million earned by a developer each year. Later, it reduced Play Store fees to 15% for subscription-based apps and as low as 10% for media apps in select categories like e-books or music distribution. According to an estimate by damages expert, Dr. Michael Williams, this fee reduction could save developers more than $109 million in service fees until 2025.
The Mountain View-based company said that apart from the $90 million payment fund, it is revising its Developer Distribution Agreement document to make it clear that developers can contact users through out-of-app means like promotional emails — similar to a change Apple made last year — if they have obtained that information in the app. The firm said it’ll introduce a new section in the Play Store named “Indie Apps Corner” to highlight apps made by small startups and independent developers, too. What’s more, the firm will publish annual Google Play transparency reports with details like app removals and account terminations.
Currently, Google and Apple force developers to use their own payment systems for in-app purchases on apps distributed through their own app stores. However, that might change due to many lawsuits and legislation against these companies in different geographies. Last year, Google agreed to let developers in South Korea use third-party payment options — after the country passed a new law over digital payment systems while reducing its service fees by 4%.
Over the last few months, Google has made different agreements with Spotify and Match Group over using alternative payment systems for their apps. When announcing a deal with the former, the search giant said that “we will be exploring user choice billing in other select countries.”

Google will reimburse developers $90 million to settle a lawsuit over Play Store earnings

Meta has reportedly shelved its watch with in-built cameras

Last year, leaked photos of Meta’s smartwatch with a camera made the rounds. But the product may never make it to the light of day: according to a report in Bloomberg, the parent company of Facebook has halted its development.
The report does not give a reason for the about-face, but in April, the tech giant said that it lost $3 billion in Q1 in metaverse development.
Meta (and before it Facebook) has been looking for years for a route into hardware to diversify its business and to fill out a more vertically integrated approach to building tech products, not unlike Apple and Google.
While Facebook-owned Oculus has produced the company’s biggest hardware hits, the watch becomes the latest in a line of stops and starts in Facebook’s hardware efforts. Others have included an ill-fated attempt to break into smartphones, the Portal screen, and a many-years-long effort with glasses (still not launched).
One reason for the shift could have been also due to design issues. Bloomberg said that a prototype of the watch had two cameras — a five-megapixel on the front and one rather oddly placed 12-megapixel camera on the back.
The company wanted to use electromyography and convert nerve signals into digital commands, which could be helpful in games and virtual world experiences. But the second camera proved to be a roadblock to that feature, and the firm decided to stop its development.
Meta had been aiming at releasing the watch next year with a $349 price tag.
According to photos and videos of the prototype, apart from the camera, the smartwatch had features that are now fairly standard for smartwatches and wrist wearables, such as activity tracking, notifications and cellular connectivity through eSIM. The device, codenamed Milan, was touted to have an 18-hour battery life.
This is not the end of the line for some of the tech it has built, it seems. Bloomberg’s report suggested that Meta is still working on other wrist-based wearables. The company showed off an AR-controller prototype last year — before it renamed itself Meta — that could be worn on your wrist.
Meta declined to comment on the story.
Meta has reportedly shelved its watch with in-built cameras

Samsung reportedly cutting smartphone production by 30M

All is not well in smartphone land. The industry was headed for a slowdown well before SARS-CoV-2 entered the picture. The glory days of expanding markets and bi-annual upgrades are seemingly at an end, and things have only been exacerbated by two years of financial hardships and supply chain constraints.
For all these reasons, it’s not surprising that manufacturers are pulling back on manufacturing. A new report from South Korea’s Maeil Business News has the world’s leading smartphone maker ramping production down by 30 million units for 2022. The news comes as sales are further hampered by the conflict in Ukraine. In March, the company followed fellow tech giants Microsoft and Apple by suspending sales in Russia.
Apple, too, has been feeling the pain. Recent Bloomberg reports noted that the iPhone maker is throttling plans to manufacture an additional 20 million phones in 2022. Instead, its numbers are reportedly going to remain flat from 2021. Those reports follow several quarters of iPhone sales that had managed to buck many of the industry’s macro trends, but the company might be coming back down to Earth, even with the imminent arrival of the iPhone 14.
It’s a perfect storm of industry and global factors that have gotten us to this place. It’s not panic time for the larger manufactures — they’ll almost certainly come out of the dip unscathed. But there are broader questions that remain about the industry going forward. Biggest of all is whether this is a lull following a decade of explosive smartphones sales, or whether not even the arrival of new technologies like foldable screens will kickstart a return to the mobile golden age.
Samsung declined to comment on the reports.
Samsung reportedly cutting smartphone production by 30M

How Much Is Expert Testimony Worth To Apple? $75000

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In the case of Samsung vs. Apple, one of the biggest tech trials on U.S. soil, today’s been all about Peter Bressler, one of Apple’s expert witnesses. He’s fought with Samsung lawyers, and affirmed just about everything Apple has accused Samsung of. As an inventor or co-inventor on about 70 design patents, and a former expert witness in seven other trials, he is nothing short of an expert. But how much is that worth?

Samsung’s counsel, Charles Verhoeven, asked Bressler point blank how much Apple has paid him to be an expert witness in this case. “So far?” Bressler asked. “$75,000.”

Who knows how much that figure will grow to by the end of the four week trial. Oh, and don’t forget Apple and Samsung have another massive battle planned for next year, regarding newer models such as the Galaxy S III.

Mr. Verhoeven also made sure to show the jury that Bressler does this for a living. Verhoeven mentioned that Bressler advertises himself as an expert witness on a website, which is currently under construction.

In either case, it’s totally normal for an expert witness to be paid for their help on a trial. It takes a lot of time and energy to do the research necessary to testify on the case. I mean, just listening to Mr. Bressler’s expert testimony was exhausting to me. I can’t imagine how he’s feeling.

Twitter: An Increasingly Great Platform For Instagram

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Twitter has been working hard over the last year to make photo sharing a core part of its product. It took over the photo-hosting role from third parties and gained deep new integration with Apple’s iOS, among other initiatives. But there’s also a big new winner coming up on top of its developer platform — mobile photo-sharing app Instagram.

New stats provided to us by social photo aggregator Pixable show how this trend played out at the South By Southwest conference in Austin last weekend. The startup tracked all photos tweeted straight from Twitter or via Instagram, that contained relevant hashtags like #SXSW and #SXSWi.

It found that out of the 63,000 photos uploaded, approximately two-thirds came from Twitter itself and one third via Instagram.

While the study didn’t look at any other photo services that share through Twitter, the number here is still surprisingly large. Instagram, which provides easy ways to alter photos and then share them to social networks, only had around 12% of the total market as of last November. One would have expected it to have less than a third of the usage last weekend.

So what’s next? SXSW is heavily attended by people from around the world who consider themselves influential early adopters. The heavy use they gave Instagram could mean they’ll be helping to evangelize the app later on.

The Instagram market numbers are also likely lower than they will be soon. It is only available for iOS now, but the forthcoming Android version will open it up to many more users (people who Twitter itself already has access to). And then there’s the already strong growth on iOS, where it has nearly doubled to 27 million users from 15 million in the last six months alone.

So, hopefully Twitter is comfortable having this new third-party app make such big waves in an area that it considers a core part of its product.

And with that, I’ll leave you with an infographic. I may hate the things, but this one does a nice and simple job of telling the story without all the crappy clipart that many others have.