One month after Epic Games and Google seemingly stopped fighting over the future of Android app distribution, they were back in a San Francisco courtroom today — where Judge James Donato just ordered Google to make it easier to install rival app stores on Android.
It’s been nearly three years since a jury unanimously decided that Google had an illegal monopoly over Android apps, and almost two years since Judge Donato decided the best way of undoing that monopoly would be to crack open Android app distribution. Donato ordered Google to carry rival Android app stores inside its own Google Play Store, and to provide rivals with complecte access to Google’s full catalog of apps, for several years.
But Epic argued that Google is still making it too difficult to install rival app stores, showing the entire courtroom a live demo of how many steps it currently takes — and Judge Donato agreed that some of those steps were unnecessary “anticompetitive friction” and ordered Google to remove them.
First, Epic’s lawyer Yonatan Even showed that if you search Google’s Play Store for the term “store for apps,” no third-party app stores appear, only physical stores. “Wait, why did Walmart come up?” Judge Donato asked. “That’s not good,” he exclaimed.
“That is not acceptable, that has to be fixed. I want every possible variation that’s even only 70 percent properly phrased,” Donato ordered. Google’s counsel agreed to make it happen.
Similarly, Judge Donato bristled when he saw that users have to press a “view” button before they can press an “install” button when choosing to install a third-party app store, and so that will change too. “You don’t get that when you’re looking at Apple Music,” he noted.
“Make that install, not view,” Donato ordered, and Google agreed to do so.
Later, Epic showed that when you search for “app store,” or even if you search directly for Aptoide, the first rival store to make it into the Google Play Store, Google doesn’t surface a normal list of apps — it shows you a new banner you have to click through to a dedicated third-party app store page.
That’s not just a problem for brand-new app stores, argued Even. Big, established companies like Amazon might decide not to launch app stores because they’d be losing the ability to appear in normal appstore search results.
Judge Donato ordered Google to fix that one, too, telling the company that it didn’t make any sense. “Why doesn’t it say ‘are you looking for music’ when you type in ‘music store’?” he asked.
Google’s attorney replied that Epic and Google had already agreed that app stores are a special category of apps that have advanced permissions. But Donato said the warning on the third-party app store page itself was sufficient to address that — there’s no need to ask a user whether they really want the thing they searched for, whether it’s a game store or a glass of water.
“We all know that when you go to a Google store or an Apple store and you type in the name of your app, you’re going to get one thing you were looking for and ten things you don’t want,” said the judge, explaining that he doesn’t think average users will be confused when they get what they’re asking for.
“Take off the ‘are you looking for’ screen, there’s no purpose for that. There’s a friction there that has no purpose whatsoever,” Donato said.
The judge wants these changes fast. “Have it done by a week from today,” he told Google. “If there’s some problem with that, let me know.‘
