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Google Can't Remove Third-Party App Store Aptoide From Users' Android Phones, Portuguese Courts Rule (prnewswire.com)
Earlier this week, the Portuguese Courts ruled a decision against Google in relation to the injunction filed by Aptoide, a popular third-party app store. It is applicable on 82 countries including UK, Germany, USA, India, among others. Google will have to stop Google Play Protect from removing the competitor Aptoide's app store from users' phone without users' knowledge which has caused losses of over 2.2 million users in the last 60 days. From a press release: The acceptance of the injunction is totally aligned with Aptoide's claim for Google to stop hiding the app store in the Android devices and showing warning messages to the users. Aptoide is now working alongside its legal team to next week fill in courts the main action, demanding from Google indemnity for all the damages caused. Aptoide, with over 250 million users, 6 billion downloads and one of the top stores globally, has presented this July, a formal complaint to the European Union's anti-trust departments against Google.
Google's android smartphones are NOT closed (like Apple's) and never have been. Their attempt to forcibly remove a competitor store even IF installed by a vendor in violation of contract and not the users themselves Is completely unethical (they won't even force OS updates for security but, by GOD, they'll reach out to your phone to take out a competitor!).
They're the Microsoft Windows of the smartphone industry trying to uninstall Mozilla.
Expect Google to just start making their own phones here very quickly.
It's about protecting the rights of Aptoide, a Portuguese entity, against the actions of Google, a business with a legal presence in Portugal. If Google only violates Aptoide's rights outside Portugal, a Portuguese court can still take action against that: having to respect the rights recognised or granted by a country to its citizens and companies is part of the cost of doing business in that country. If a US-based app store sued Google for the same reason, and a US court ruled that Google had to stop interfering, even outside the US, no, I do not believe there would be any uproar.
Aptoide has long provided access to repositories of pirated apps, and has been less than willing to remove them at the request of app developers. Anyone can create a repository, load it with pirated apps, and publish it through Aptoide. That's probably what got Google to blacklist them.
It's worth noting that Aptoide's own repository is clean, but with their linking to other repositories that they have zero control over, there's going to be plenty out there for Google to want to blacklist them for.
F-Droid, which is a fork of Aptoide that uses a single repository instead of publishing other third-party repositories, is available on the Google Play Store, so I don't think Google has a problem with rival app stores. I'd bet money that Google's actions against Aptoide have more to do with the repositories of pirated apps that are published through Aptoide, since if you get a paid app for free through Aptoide, Google doesn't get their cut.