The company has one week to make things right.
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 edge reports that Judge James Donato, the U.S. District Court judge who oversaw the company’s antitrust case with Epic, believes Google introduced unnecessary “anticompetitive friction” into the download process and gave 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 demonstrated this by entering the search term “app store,” which returned no results for app stores and only results for physical stores like Walmart. The lawyers also showed that while users are able to find third-party app stores, they are not displayed in the normal list of search results and are instead buried under a banner for third-party app stores. “This is not acceptable, this must be corrected. I want all possible variations, even just 70 percent, to be correctly formulated,” Donato said.
Google’s decision to replace the normal “Install” button with a “View” button on the Play Store’s only third-party app store, Aptoide, was also a major point of contention. Donato suggested that forcing people to go through an extra layer of menus to install the store discouraged them from downloading it, according to The edge. In response to Donato’s complaints, Google finally agreed to make changes and implement them next week.
The company first announced that it would support third-party app stores in March 2026, one of several outcomes of a deal reached with Epic near the end of 2025. The deal was a modified version of Donato’s proposed 2024 remedy, which was largely aimed at loosening Google’s control over the Play Store in response to the court’s finding that the company had a monopoly on app distribution in 2023. Clearly, Google’s first pass wasn’t loose enough.
