A US judge ordered Google to make Android available to competing app stores

A US judge on Monday ordered Google to open its Android smartphone operating system to rival app stores, marking a new legal setback for the tech giant.

The injunction follows Google’s defeat in an antitrust suit brought by Fortnite developer Epic Games, in which a California jury found that Google exercised illegal monopoly power through its Android Play store.

In December, a San Francisco jury took just a few hours to reach a decision against Google, finding that the company had engaged in various illegal strategies to maintain its monopoly over Android phone app stores.

The order, which Google is appealing, follows a similar setback in August, when another judge found that the world’s leading search engine, Google, also constituted an illegal monopoly.

Google also faces an antitrust lawsuit in the third federal case pending in Virginia over the company’s dominance in online advertising.

Under the order, Epic Games will for the next three years ban Google from several practices that a jury in a landmark case found anticompetitive.

These prohibitions include sharing revenue with potential competitors and requiring developers to only run apps on the Play Store.

The judge also ordered the creation of a three-person Technical Committee that will supervise the implementation of the changes and resolve any disputes.

This order poses a serious challenge to Google’s dominance in the Android app ecosystem and could change the mobile app landscape in the coming years.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney urged companies to use this opportunity “to build a vibrant and competitive Android ecosystem with such critical mass that Google won’t be able to stop it.”

He also stressed that the changes would only apply in the US, but promised that “the legal and regulatory fight will continue around the world.”

– Google appeals –

Google said it would appeal the order and request it be quashed pending further legal proceedings.

The judge stated that the order came into force on November 1, and some provisions were to remain in force until July 1.

“We will continue to advocate for what is best for developers, device manufacturers and the billions of Android users around the world,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s vice president of regulatory affairs.

Phones running the Android operating system have approximately 70 percent of the global smartphone market.

Smartphone companies can install the Android app for free, as long as the Play app store remains on the homepage and other Google offerings are pre-installed.

The jury found that Google acted illegally to ensure that the Google Play app store was the only channel for payments to third-party apps such as Fortnite and other games.

A significant portion of app store revenue comes from video games, and Epic Games has long sought to keep payments for mobile games like Fortnite outside of Google or Apple’s app stores, where commissions can run as high as 30%.

Epic largely lost a similar case against Apple, where another U.S. judge ruled largely in favor of the iPhone maker.

Apple and Google regularly say that the commissions charged by their app stores are in line with industry standards and that they pay for benefits such as reach, transaction security and malware detection.

Google also argued that the agreement with smartphone makers helped Android devices better compete with Apple’s iPhone.

But the lawsuit revealed that Google rakes in tens of billions of dollars in revenue through its app store.

To maintain end-to-end app support, Google paid smartphone makers a cut of revenue in exchange for the Play Store remaining the exclusive gateway.

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