More legal trouble for Google Inc. 189,70 -0,45 -0,24% Android and their App Store (Google Play):

A judge this week granted class-action status to antitrust litigation that now covers 21 million Google Play customers in 12 states—Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—and five US territories, including American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. The lawsuit claims that Google’s misleading warnings led millions of customers nationwide to pay “artificially inflated” prices for apps they could have downloaded cheaper elsewhere.

Last year, dozens of state attorneys general sued Google on these same antitrust grounds. Those state enforcers alleged that Google made it impossible for other app stores to compete, and the company had a monopoly on Android apps. The legal teams for the customers suing are now joining forces with the states suing; if the customers win, Google owner Alphabet Inc. could be on the hook for an estimated $4.7 billion in damages from the class-action suit alone.

I really don’t understand this as having used Google Play (Google’s app store) for well over 10-years now, I’ve never paid for an app. The problem I have with their above claim is “Google’s warning” (about downloading apps from third-party app stores) is not misleading. We’ve seen malicious Android apps get removed from Google Play, but they are still out in the wild on 3rd party app stores and reeking havoc infecting devices. A recent revelation is about several (unnamed) ‘School Yard Bully’ apps masquerading as reading and education apps which infected 300,000 devices to steal Facebook accounts from multiple countries. Again, these have been removed from Google Play, but are still out on 3rd party app stores.

via Ars Technica