For the first time in the history of mobile phones, Americans will be able to access a variety of app stores on Android phones, following game developer Epic Games’ legal victory over Google. Fiona Scott Morton and Nick Jacobson discuss how Google may try to undermine the court’s remedies to stifle competition and how both American and European regulators can respond to protect competition.
Americans are about to have meaningful choices among app stores on Android phones. These choices will reduce the prices and fees many users pay for their apps and in-app purchases and give them a wider variety of apps to download. It will be the first time Americans have such freedom in the history of mobile handsets.
The increase in choice and competition is unfolding as a consequence of the 2020 antitrust lawsuits that Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite and other video games, filed against both Google and Apple. In the U.S.-based lawsuits, Epic Games argued that it should be able to operate its own app store on Apple and Android phones, thereby obtaining control of both content and commission fees, which often reached 30% of purchase costs. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Digital Markets Act has, to the surprise of many, made less progress in opening up Android app distribution. But in both jurisdictions, if courts and regulators stay the course, a competitive and innovative market will be on its way.
Epic largely lost its case against Apple. But in a late 2023 trial, a jury sided with Epic on every claim it made against Google. These claims included charges that Google’s constraints on payments and distribution, which heavily favored its own Play Store, violated U.S. antitrust law. After the verdict, the judge issued a remedies decision that took effect in early November 2025, after Google lost its appeal to the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court declined to stay the injunction. The three-year injunction requires as follows:
1. Google must allow third party app stores to be available for download on the Google Play Store. This provision creates viable distribution for competing stores.
2. Google may not pay handset manufacturers to preference the Play Store on their handsets (or impose other contractual terms that secure default/exclusive status for the Play Store). This stops Google from using its monopoly profits to buy access and block competing stores.
3. Google must allow developers to link users to third-party payment systems for in-app purchases instead of routing all payments through Google’s payment system that charges up to a 30% fee for purchases.
4. Google must share a list of its apps so that third-party stores can direct users to the Play Store for download when the app they are searching for is not available in the third-party store. This capability makes a third-party store much more attractive as a “home” store for users.
Epic’s victory has fundamentally changed the capabilities of Americans’ Android phones. As of the end of 2025, users in the United States can now download Epic, Aptoide, and other third-party stores from the websites of those companies, and then access content within stores and at fee levels that are not chosen by Google. By mid-2026, the more technically complex mandates (including #1 and 4 above) will also come into force, allowing these stores to list themselves on the Play Store as well.
Securing Epic’s victory against entrenched monopoly
Although the court’s injunction opens the door to competition on the Android operating system (OS), Google has strong incentives to neuter it. Android OS is the only major licensable mobile OS in the world. Nearly three in four mobile handsets worldwide run Android (almost every other handset is an iPhone running Apple’s proprietary iOS), although the rate is closer to 40% in the U.S. The value that Google secures by maintaining its mobile OS monopoly is substantial, and a dominant app store is key to that monopoly maintenance.
First, an entrenched monopoly like Google wants to earn profits in those markets that cannot be captured with the monopoly in the OS alone. Second, it wants to protect the OS from technological developments in adjacent markets that might eventually threaten market power in the OS. Third party app stores are such a threat because they lower switching costs between operating systems (users can keep their apps despite changing operating systems) and thus induce entry, making them “middleware.” Bill Gates feared the Netscape browser would become middleware in the 1990s and would “commoditize” the Microsoft operating system, which was one reason he wanted to cut off Netscape’s “air supply” by controversially bundling Microsoft products and restricting Netscape’s access to PC manufacturers. An app store such as WeChat in China can play this same role and is therefore threatening to a dominant OS like Google Android.
Because of its market power in search and mobile operating systems, Google has a number of technical and financial tools it can use to impede competing distribution channels on Android in the absence of antitrust enforcement. Google can require rival app stores to be located on a back page, prevent pre-installation, and limit the functionality of the stores. It can pay developers not to distribute through third-party stores, assess fees on those stores’ activities, and impose fees on downloads that originate on a developer’s website. If Google succeeds in preventing rival distribution and monetization systems from growing on Android handsets, it can extract rents from developers with popular products. It can also simultaneously diminish the competitive threat the “middleware” stores pose to its OS monopoly, preventing rival stores from becoming a user’s “home” where they contact friends, engage in commerce, and consume content, all of which ease a user’s transition to a rival OS.
The remedies ordered by the court were designed to stop this behavior. Enforcing them will be key to developing meaningful choice for consumers for app distribution and payments on Google Android.
E.U. enforcement challenges
In contrast to the U.S. courts, European Union regulators have not successfully pressed Google to make Android equally open and functional for third party app stores. European law includes regulation of the Play Store through the Digital Markets Act. The law gives the European Commission the authority to investigate non-compliance, specify what gatekeepers—a group of Big Tech platforms including Google with substantial market power—must do, and impose penalties for noncompliance. In theory, these tools give E.U. regulators a more expansive and flexible regime through which to introduce and protect competition than that available to American enforcers. In practice, E.U. enforcement has lagged behind U.S. progress driven by Epic’s litigation.
Formally, the Commission has one open noncompliance investigation into Google for its variety of policies that impose fees on apps downloaded online and from third-party app stores. Contrary to its legal obligations, during the course of the yearslong investigation, Google seems to have worsened the third-party experience: withholding user payment information, increasing technical complexity, and adding discriminatory “scare screens” to deter users from giving Play Store competitors a chance.
The Commission’s investigation tools should be able to address Google’s technical and monetary circumvention. However, the Commission has yet even to reach a verdict on the oldest version of Google’s attempt at compliance (dating to March 2024, when the Commission launched its investigation), long since widely agreed to be noncompliant. In the meantime, Google has tweaked its compliance proposals time and again. Google’s newest proposal adopts some components of Apple’s proposed E.U. fee structure with the addition of varying per-app fees in different E.U. countries. Some of these fees would seem to require competitors to share sensitive transaction data with Google itself.
By piling changes onto an already noncompliant structure, Google may be trying to overwhelm the Commission and slow its enforcement. When the Commission does conclude its investigation—ideally with a commitment from Google immediately to adopt successful U.S. remedies and any other necessary changes—the Commission should take these accumulating profits and delays into account in its enforcement and fines.
Looking ahead
While Google may try similar circumvention strategies in the U.S., active enforcement of the court’s injunction should overcome them. As a potential instance of such circumvention, in a new twist in November, the erstwhile opponents, Epic and Google, together proposed an alternative settlement to set aside the court’s injunction. The settlement retains or modestly expands some aspects of the injunction (e.g., it commits Google to accepting a version of the Epic app store, and other qualifying stores, not only in the U.S. but also worldwide) but changes other aspects to diminish competition. The proposed terms allow Google to pay for preferential placement of its store, require developers always to offer Google billing, eliminate the availability of an app catalogue, and set sanctioned fee levels for linked-out purchases. If accepted by the court, these provisions would make the remedy much weaker.
Another outstanding question is the fee structure Google will seek to impose on third party apps in the U.S. As of December 2025, Google has not imposed any fees on developers linking out purchases (this structure aligns with the injunction in Epic v. Apple). It is possible the company will try to impose fees at a later date. The best course would be to prevent fees on rival app stores for the duration of the injunction to allow competition to take hold. If the court determines that the remedy has worked and created a competitive app distribution environment, fees can then be determined by the market, not the court. In the meantime, any revenue Google forgoes (i.e., at competitive prices that courts in the United Kingdom have determined likely to be far lower than Google’s monopoly pricing) will be part of the court’s mandate to disgorge the fruits of illegal conduct. If the court does accept proposed fee levels, it risks setting a worldwide standard in the absence of competition, entrenching higher prices and making it more difficult for regulators and courts around the world to protect competitive price determination.
Assuming the main components of the injunction remain in force, the key test will be timely entry of competitors on Android. The more quality entrants U.S. consumers enjoy, the harder it will be for Google to shut down competition upon the expiration of the injunction—and the faster Android users will benefit from it. The more quickly that the EU can induce effective compliance in its own jurisdiction, the greater the potential market size becomes for competing app stores. The incentive to enter and compete will grow.
The combination of the E.U. and U.S. markets will likely encourage more variety in third-party stores and generate options such as children’s app stores with limited, more age-appropriate content, environmental app stores with low carbon businesses only, or news stores where the news providers keep all the revenue they earn. With robust U.S. enforcement, this exciting future will be close at hand—but only on Android for now.
Authors’ Disclosures: Fiona Scott Morton is an economic expert in the United Kingdom for a group of advertisers seeking damages from Google, and in other competition cases both in the United States and United Kingdom. She regularly works as an expert witness for government plaintiffs on matters that are confidential. Nick Jacobson is the associate program manager at Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy. The views expressed in this article are solely his and do not necessarily reflect those of the Tobin Center. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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