BENGALURU: When industry representatives questioned whether Apple and Google misuse their position as operators of app stores by giving an advantage in rankings to their own apps over those of competitors, tech giant Google replied that it has formal policies prohibiting the company-wide sharing of identifiable data about third-party apps gathered by Play.
Since app stores enable the discovery of apps through search function, this opens an avenue for Apple and Google to misuse their position as operators of app stores, industry representatives told the standing committee on finance that tabled its report on anti-competitive practices by big tech companies in Lok Sabha last week
In its response, Google said third-party data is not shared with Google’s first-party app developers to unfairly advantage them. Amazon said it is governed by the FDI policy and it strictly complies with that policy. “This means Amazon India can’t and doesn’t assume a dual role on its marketplace by offering retail products for sale to consumers,” it said.
Earlier the Competition Commission of India (CCI) had said, “If somebody makes a complaint that they are not following platform neutrality, we should have a faster mechanism to deal with that issue.”
Also, industry representatives raised the issue of the billing system. According to them, though the majority of the developers in India don’t use the proprietary billing system of Google, they are heavily dependent on Google Play Store for their discovery and review process.
They say app stores make it difficult for them as they bundle all services into one. “The size and ubiquity of the dominant app stores, which benefit immensely from being pre-installed on their own operating systems, makes it almost impossible to negotiate the quantum or threshold for commissions,” they said.