A federal judge has given Google exactly one week to stop making it needlessly difficult to find and install rival app stores inside the Google Play Store, ruling that several steps in the current process serve no purpose beyond discouraging competition.
US District Judge James Donato issued the order on August 13 during a San Francisco hearing in the long-running Epic Games v. Google antitrust case, after Epic’s legal team demonstrated in court how Google’s own search and install flow steers users away from competing app stores — even when they search for exactly that.
Three Specific Fixes, One Week to Ship Them
According to courtroom reporting from The Verge, Epic’s lawyer Yonatan Even showed Donato that searching Google Play for “store for apps” surfaced physical retailers like Walmart instead of any third-party app store. The judge was unimpressed and ordered Google to fix every close variant of that search, agreeing that even a roughly 70-percent-accurate phrasing of the query should still return the right result.
Two more friction points came out of the same hearing:
- An extra tap before install: Users currently have to press “View” before they can press “Install” when choosing a third-party app store — a step Donato noted doesn’t exist for apps like Apple Music. He ordered Google to make “Install” the first button users see, and Google’s counsel agreed on the spot.
- A detour instead of normal results: Searching directly for “app store,” or for Aptoide by name — the first rival store readmitted to Play Store — surfaces a banner that has to be clicked through to a separate third-party-store page, rather than a normal search listing. Epic argued this discourages even large companies, naming Amazon as an example, from building a store at all if doing so means disappearing from ordinary search results.
Google’s attorney tried to defend that click-through as a necessary warning screen for apps with elevated system permissions, but Donato didn’t accept it — the warning already lives on the third-party store’s own landing page, he said, so gating the search result behind a second screen serves no purpose.
“Take off the ‘are you looking for’ screen, there’s no purpose for that. There’s a friction there that has no purpose whatsoever,” Judge Donato said, according to The Verge’s courtroom account of the hearing.
Google’s counsel agreed to each of the three changes in court. Donato wants all of them live within a week — by August 20.
Why It Matters for Android Users
This is a compliance fight over an order Donato first issued nearly two years ago, requiring Google to open Play Store distribution to competitors after a 2023 jury found the company had run an illegal Android app store monopoly. Google’s Play Catalog Access Program technically opened in July, and Aptoide became the first rival store to return to Play Store in the US earlier this month. But Epic’s courtroom demo made the case that “open” on paper doesn’t mean discoverable in practice — if a rival store is buried behind a warning screen that a search for Walmart doesn’t even trigger, most Android users will never find it.
Nothing changes about how you install apps today. But if Google complies on schedule, searching Play Store for a rival app store should get noticeably easier within the week — a real test of whether Android’s app-distribution monopoly is actually cracking open, or just technically ajar.
Source: The Verge (Sean Hollister), corroborated by Law360
