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Last tidbit of the day: Amazon’s Donn Morrill says the Amazon Appstore’s actual commission rate was calculated at roughly 10 percent. We also saw Amazon paid some developers one-time fees of up to $100,000 to develop apps and would sometimes offer other deals. See you tomorrow! We’re off starting Wednesday, though, and will stay off through Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
We’re listening to video deposition from August 11, 2022, with Donn Morrill, a director of apps at Amazon who’s also worked with teams on the company’s Alexa voice assistant. Google was once worried about Amazon stealing its whales, but that threat didn’t materialize, and it’s still not clear whether Google needed to change a thing to keep it from happening. Do we get that now, or will his deposition touch on a different facet of Android friction?
I’m not sure we’ve heard that number before — Amazon exec Donn Morrill just read it off a spreadsheet prepped by lawyers without questioning it. He says Amazon incurred roughly $1.4 billion in expenses on the Appstore from 2015 through 2021. In 2018, roughly a third of the Appstore’s sales came from Android. By the end of 2021, it was less than 10 percent, he testified — with third-party Android devices (read: not Kindle Fire tablets) contributing “just north of $15 million.” That’s tiny. It helps make Epic’s point that a sideloaded app store isn’t really a viable competito...
We’re done with Epic’s big-name witnesses like Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney — who will come next? (We never did hear another peep about “father of Android” Andy Rubin’s video deposition, for that matter...) We’ll probably begin with Amazon exec Donn Morrill, though, whose testimony barely began before the judge told us all to go home yesterday.