At Some Point In Time, Google Tried To Kill Samsung’s Galaxy Store

If you wanted to download apps onto an Android handset, there’s a good chance that you almost always default to the Google Play Store, but see, that’s one of the beauties of Android and that is if you don’t want to use Google, you can always turn to alternatives. In fact, companies like Samsung actually bundle their own app store, the Galaxy Store, on their phones.

It seems that at some point in time, Google actually felt threatened by all these third-party stores that they attempted to have them “killed”. This is according to an antitrust lawsuit filed against Google in which according to the lawsuit, Google apparently tried to pay popular app developers not to list their apps on the Samsung Galaxy Store or Amazon’s Appstore.

Presumably the idea behind this tactic is that it would encourage users to use the Play Store and abandon other app stores, thus giving Google more control. The lawsuit even claims that Google made a “direct attempt” to pay Samsung to abandon their relationships with top developers and to “scale back competition” with its app store.

Google has since published a blog post refuting these claims. According to Google’s senior director of public policy Wilson White, “If you don’t find the app you’re looking for in Google Play, you can choose to download the app from a rival app store or directly from a developer’s website. We don’t impose the same restrictions as other mobile operating systems do.” He even goes as far as calling the lawsuit “meritless” that also “ignores Android’s openness”.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Apps, Google, Legal, Samsung, Social Hit