Judge Orders Google to Make Third-Party App Stores Actually Findable in Play Store

US District Court Judge James Donato, presiding over the long-running Epic Games v. Google antitrust case, ordered Google on August 14, 2026 to make it easier for Android users to discover and install third-party app stores from the Play Store, giving the company one week to implement changes.

Judge Donato found that Google had introduced unnecessary "anticompetitive friction" into the process of downloading rival app stores. A third-party app store is simply an alternative to Google's Play Store — a separate app marketplace where users can browse and install software on their phone. Donato took specific aim at two areas: how these alternative stores appear in Play Store search results, and the installation flow itself.

The criticism was grounded in a demonstration conducted by Epic's legal team. Searching the Play Store for "store for apps" returned no app store results at all, surfacing instead listings for physical retailers such as Walmart. Third-party app stores that are indexed in the Play Store are not shown in the normal results list but are instead buried under a separate banner for third-party app stores, requiring users to navigate through an additional layer of menus to reach them.

Donato was blunt about the inadequacy of the current implementation. "That is not acceptable, that has to be fixed," he said. "I want every possible variation that's even only 70 percent properly phrased" (Engadget).

The sole third-party app store currently available through the Play Store is Aptoide. Google had replaced the standard "Install" button on Aptoide's listing with a "View" button, an additional step that Donato suggested was discouraging users from downloading it.

Google agreed to make changes and committed to implementing them within the following week.

This dispute is the latest chapter in litigation stretching back to 2020, when Epic Games filed suit against Google in the US District Court for the Northern District of California (case number 3:20-cv-05671). A jury found in 2023 that Google held a monopoly on app distribution. In October 2024, Judge Donato issued a permanent injunction requiring Google to open Android to third-party app stores, prohibit barring alternative in-app payment methods for three years, and distribute rival app stores through the Play Store itself (Reuters). Google appealed the verdict and sought to pause the order (case number 24-6256).

Google and Epic reached a settlement near the end of 2025, producing a modified version of Donato's 2024 remedy. As part of that settlement, Google announced in March 2026 that it would support third-party app stores on Android, with the requirement beginning July 22 (Courthouse News). Third-party app stores began rolling out in Google Play earlier in August 2026, though only Aptoide was available at the time (Ars Technica).

The broader context here is the gap between nominal compliance and functional access. Google met the letter of the settlement by listing Aptoide in the Play Store. But the judge's objections, from the absent search results for natural-language app-store queries to the substituted "View" button, describe a product experience engineered to make discovery difficult without technically blocking it. Donato's demand for "every possible variation that's even only 70 percent properly phrased" signals that he is not prepared to accept a minimum-effort interpretation of the injunction's search-ranking requirements.

This is the recurring tension in antitrust remedies involving platform owners: a court can order interoperability — the ability of different systems to work together — but the implementing party retains substantial control over the quality of that interoperability. The search ranking, the button label, the number of taps to complete an installation, the placement in results versus behind a banner — each of these is a design decision that can satisfy a legal obligation while still steering users back to the first-party store. Donato's intervention suggests he is monitoring not just whether Google has technically complied, but whether the user experience it has built around compliance is itself anticompetitive.

The irony of the "store for apps" search returning Walmart listings rather than actual app stores is not subtle. Google's search infrastructure, which powers the most widely used information retrieval system on the planet, could not surface a single alternative app store for a query that describes one almost perfectly. Whether that is a ranking decision, a categorization decision, or something else, the result is that a court-ordered remedy was functionally invisible to the users it was supposed to serve.

Google now has one week to close that gap.