RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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FotoField/Shutterstock Google began distributing third-party app stores through its Play Store earlier this week, but not everyone is happy with the company's approach. The Verge reports that Judge James Donato, the US District Court judge who oversaw the company's antitrust case with Epic, believes Google has introduced unnecessary "anticompetitive friction" to the download process and has given the company a week to make changes.
The judge took issue with the way Google presents third-party app stores in search results and the current process for installing them from the Play Store. Epic's lawyers reportedly demoed entering the search term "store for apps," which turned up no results for app stores and only results for physical stores like Walmart. The lawyers also showed that even if users are able to find third-party app stores, they're not displayed in the normal list of search results and are instead buried under a banner for third-party app stores. "That is not acceptable, that has to be fixed. I want every possible variation that's even only 70 percent properly phrased," Donato said.
Google's decision to replace the normal "Install" button with a "View" button on the only third-party app store on the Play Store, Aptoide , was also a major point of contention. Donato suggested that making people jump through an extra layer of menus to install the store was discouraging them from downloading it, according to The Verge . In response to Donato's complaints, Google ultimately agreed to make changes and implement them in the next week.
The company first announced it would support third-party app stores in March 2026, one of several results of a settlement it reached with Epic near the end of 2025. The settlement was a modified version of the remedy Donato came up with in 2024 , which largely focused on loosening Google's control of the Play Store in response to the court finding the company had a monopoly on app distribution in 2023. Clearly Google's first pass wasn't loose enough.
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