Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge

Today, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling in Epic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps — unless developers opt out individually. These were Epic’s biggest asks, and they’re not all that Epic has won today.

Judge Donato’s permanent injunction also blocks Google from all sorts of other behavior that was found anticompetitive, too — we’re adding full details to this story now.

Epic Games originally sued Google on August 13th, 2020 — the very same day it sued Apple, too. The game developer sprung a premeditated trap on both tech giants by attempting to bypass their 30 percent fee on in-app purchases with a surprise update to its mega-popular game Fortnite. Both tech companies retaliated by kicking Fortnite off their app stores, only to be met by a coordinated #FreeFortnite action campaign — and a pair of lawsuits accusing each of creating illegal monopolies.

The Apple case is already over, and Apple mostly won: the Supreme Court rejected Epic’s final appeal this January. The only thing Epic legally achieved there was an order dismantling Apple’s “anti-steering rules,” theoretically letting developers freely tell their customers how to bypass Apple’s payment systems. (I won’t discuss the Apple case more than this brief outline, since I’m ethically bound.)

But the Google case took far longer to kick off, and it went very differently. I spent over 15 days reporting live from the courtroom, and I saw Epic show time and again that Google was running scared, that Google doesn’t treat developers equally, that Google had something to hide.

The jury in Epic v. Google was thoroughly convinced: last December, it reached the unanimous verdict that the Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service were an illegal monopoly, and that many of the special deals it made with game developers and phone manufacturers were anticompetitive behavior.

In August, Donato warned that Google would pay for its behavior. “We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen,” he said. In remedy hearings, he rejected Google’s suggestions that meeting Epic’s demands would take too much work, or cost too much money, or were impossible to arrange without taking substantial time.

It’s not yet clear whether Google will have to immediately follow the court’s demands. Google has already promised to appeal the verdict — and like Apple, Google will likely ask that appeals court to press pause on Judge Donato’s order while it tries its luck again. Apple spent years delaying the anti-steering rules change with its legal appeals.