So this week the entire tech internet was wall to wall OpenAI: Altman up on stage doing the DevDay keynote, GPT-4 Turbo, the 128k context window, custom GPTs you can supposedly build without writing code. Everyone's got a hot take on it already and honestly I don't have much to add, I was traveling for work and only caught the headlines on my phone in an airport lounge, so I'll leave that one to the sites that actually watched the stream.
What I've actually had open in a browser tab since Monday is the Epic Games v. Google trial that kicked off in federal court in San Francisco. Judge James Donato's courtroom, jury selection and opening statements this week. Epic and Match Group (yes, the Tinder people, they got folded into the same case) both suing Google over how the Play Store is run — the 30% cut, the requirement that you use Google's billing system, all of it. This is the sequel nobody asked for to Epic v. Apple, except Epic mostly lost that one back in 2021 on the antitrust claims, so there's an extra layer of "will round two go differently" hanging over this.
I care about this one more than I probably should, because I've actually been on the other side of that 30% number. Years ago I put a dumb little utility app on the Play Store, nothing fancy, a $2.99 one-time unlock for some extra features. In a decent month it'd bring in maybe $340 and change, and Google would just take its cut off the top before I ever saw a cent. Under the small-business program that's technically 15% now instead of 30% if you're under a million dollars a year (which, obviously, I very much was), but the part that actually annoyed me wasn't even the percentage. It was that I couldn't just put a "buy it on our website, it's cheaper" link in the app. Google's policies are pretty explicit that you can't route people around their billing for digital purchases, and violate that and you're looking at your app getting pulled, not just a warning email. I got one of those warning emails once for something totally unrelated (a permissions declaration I filled out wrong) and the three days of not knowing whether my app would just vanish from the store was not a fun three days.
Anyway. That's the whole reason I'm watching this trial instead of writing another "here's what GPTs mean for you" post like every other blog this week. The Match Group angle is honestly the more interesting one to me: dating apps have brutal margins already and getting cut 30% on subscriptions is a very different kind of painful than it is for a game studio sitting on Fortnite money. Testimony's supposed to run for weeks, this trial's not wrapping up before Thanksgiving at the earliest from what I've read, so there's plenty of time for depositions and internal emails to leak out that make somebody look bad. That's usually how these things go — Epic v. Apple had that whole saga of Apple executives' emails getting read into the record, and I fully expect the same kind of thing here, some Google product manager's Slack message from 2019 ending up in a filing.
Do I think a jury verdict actually changes anything for someone like past-me with a $2.99 app? Probably not much, if I'm honest. Even if Google loses and has to open things up, sideloading an app or using a third-party store is still enough of a hassle that the overwhelming majority of users are never going to bother. The default is the product, basically, and that's true whether or not the default is technically a monopoly under the Sherman Act. I'd love to be wrong about that.
Also, small aside, I finally caved and set up a Bluesky invite for myself this week after about four people I follow on the bird site posted their codes. Not switching anything over yet, mostly just poking around and reserving my handle before someone else grabs it. More on that another day, maybe, if it turns into anything worth writing about.