Google and Apple discussed an Android-iOS partnership years ago
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL; DR
- Epic’s antitrust complaint against Google mentions a private meeting between Larry Page and Steve Jobs.
- The two tech CEOs apparently discussed a partnership between Android and iOS as early as 2010.
- The purpose of highlighting the incident is to determine that the two companies together have a duopoly over app distribution.
Newly revised documents from the Epic vs. Google process reveal some surprising details about a private meeting between former Google and Apple CEOs.
As the Politico cartel reporter noted Leah Nylen, Epic’s complaint against Google mentions that the two tech companies have a close relationship, further reducing the incentive for Google to compete, innovate, and invest in app distribution as Google is reluctant to work with its “competitor” Apple benefits.
The statement is followed by details of a meeting between Larry Page and Steve Jobs in 2010, at which the two tech stars apparently talked about a “partnership” between Android and iOS. “There will always be places where we compete and places where we work together,” Page allegedly told Jobs, ostensibly in the context of similar guidelines for developers.
Our vision is that we work as if we were a company
The complaint also accuses Google and Apple of being “leisurely duopoly”, offering developers identical terms and changing those terms at the same time, rather than actually competing with one another. With that in mind, the document refers to some notes collected after a meeting between senior executives at Google and Apple. “Our vision is that we work as if we were a company,” it says in an excerpt from the notes.
The lawsuit also alleges that Google encouraged phone manufacturers to abandon third-party app stores. According to the text, the company implemented a “Premier Device Program” in 2019, which gave smartphone OEMs a larger share of search revenue if they agreed to ship devices without app stores other than the Google Play Store.
Phones under the program received 12% of search revenue from Google versus the usual 8%. Google also offered between 3% and 6% of customer spend on the Google Play Store on their phones to some companies like LG and Motorola.
To further illustrate the dominance of the Play Store, the lawsuit notes that by May 2020, many of the world’s largest and most popular Android OEMs had given Google Play exclusivity for most of their new Android devices. Chinese phone manufacturers like Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus had around 70% of their new devices under Google’s “Premier” program, while Sony (50%) and Xiaomi (40%) were less conditional.
