New evidence published in the lawsuit between Epic Games and Google revealed that the big G carried out in 2019 a plan called the “Premier Device Program” with which it paid Android phone manufacturers to prevent them from selling phones with pre-installed third-party app stores.
In exchange for manufacturers reducing Google’s competition on the world’s millions of Android phones, the Mountain View company offered up to 12% of Google Search’s revenue from its devices.
Likewise, companies such as LG and Motorola benefited from even more lucrative deals, as the brand also offered between 3 and 6% of the revenue that customers spent through their devices in the Play Store.
For obvious reasons, Samsung and Huawei were not within this program, as both companies offered their application store within their devices.
Epic Games mentioned that this is an anti-competitive practice by Google, and strengthened the domain of the Play Store on Android, since by 2020 Motorola and LG had 98 and 95% of their equipment in the “Premier Device Program”, while BBK Electronics brands (OPPO, OnePlus, vivo and realme) had roughly 70% of their equipment under the deal.
Xiaomi was one of the manufacturers least committed to Google, since the Chinese manufacturer only had 40% of its conditioned equipment.
Google’s fear of Epic Games
According to lawyers for Epic Games, Google was afraid that Epic would incentivize other big developers to go down the path of offering their biggest games outside of the Play Store, which would sap revenue for the company, which it estimated could lose up to 6,000. million dollars in 2022 without the commission of 30% of the in-app purchases of best-selling games.
To take care of this situation, the company created “Project Hug” (the hug project), where it invested hundreds of millions of dollars (the amount was not specified) in at least 20 agreements with the main developers of Android games.