Epic Games’ Victory Could Dismantle the Google Play Store
Antitrust law threatens to hand the Play Store Google built into a global platform for millions to its rivals.
Key Takeaways
Epic Games has used antitrust law to force Google to open its Play Store—its full app catalog and outside billing—to rival app stores, undermining the global marketplace Google built, which has benefited billions of users and developers with its discovery, monetization, and security tools.
Android permits sideloading, letting developers avoid Play Store rules and fees, though Google warns users about risks and offers perks for staying on Play. Epic inserted code to bypass Google’s fee, was removed for violating contract terms, and then turned to antitrust courts to force Google to change its terms.
Google’s alleged crime is offering developers a choice: pay for their services, or sideload freely without the Play Store’s exclusive tools and protections. The courts punish Google for trying to preserve the value of what it built rather than letting others exploit its achievements.
Courts found Google guilty of monopolizing Android app distribution and in-app billing, rejecting its argument that it competes with Apple in the broader mobile-gaming market. By absurdly defining the market as the “Android-only app distribution” market, the ruling labels Google a monopolist because it created the very ecosystem in which it operates.
Epic can exploit Google only because arbitrary antitrust laws enable courts to define markets so narrowly that any successful business can be branded a monopolist, even when customers are free to use alternatives. But Google has the right to control the platform it created rather than be compelled to give competitors privileged access to it.
Would you call it absurd if Costco was forced by law to allow Walmart to set up shop and sell products within Costco’s Warehouse, rent free? Or, what if the law mandated that Disneyland allow anyone to set up a kiosk in the middle of the park and sell exact copies of Disney’s merchandise? If so, consider the antitrust court’s treatment of Google in their fight with Epic Games — which represents a similar act of injustice.
On Oct. 27th, 2025, Google petitioned the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling that forces Google to host competitor app stores inside Google’s Play Store, grant rivals full access to its three-million-app catalog, and let developers steer users to outside billing, denying Google its fees.1, 2 Although the Supreme Court now has a chance to reverse the damage, so far Epic Games, the developer of a blockbuster mobile game Fortnite, has succeeded in epically exploiting Google’s business.3
From Innovation to Indictment
With Android, Google created the world’s largest open platform, enabling myriad device makers to put a smartphone in the pockets of billions, creating vast new markets for ideas and commerce. The Google Play Store did for mobile apps what Google Search did for the web: created a global marketplace, where developers can instantly reach billions with built-in discovery, monetization, and security tools. Device makers, developers, and users all owe much of their ability to create, trade, and use a variety of valuable apps to Google’s development and stewardship of the Android ecosystem, including, crucially, the Play Store.
Unlike Apple’s tightly controlled iOS and App Store (another of Epic’s targets in courts), Google’s Android OS allows “sideloading,” i.e., installing apps that need not comply with Play Store terms such as using Google Pay Billing services and paying 30% commission on in-app purchases.4 Within sideloaded apps, developers like Epic are free to use other payment systems and thus avoid Google’s fees (as Epic Games does with a non-Google Play version of Fortnite).
However, Google warns users when downloading anything from an unofficial source using “scare screen” notifications, which discourages many (about a third of all users would stop in the middle of sideloading Fortnite). Google also offers perks and benefits to app developers to stay exclusively on Play, making an alternative app store on Android a less attractive alternative. Thus, sideloading apps or other app stores on Android is a free, but not equal, alternative to Play Store.
Epic Games decided it did not like either option. It was both unwilling to pay Google the fee it demanded for its services on Play Store, and disgruntled with sideloading. So, Epic protested Google’s terms by purposefully violating them and inserting code directly into its Play Store version of Fortnite that would allow it to bypass Google’s fee, without sideloading. After Google removed Fortnite for a clear violation of contract, Epic Games enlisted antitrust laws to help them exploit Google’s business. The courts complied.
What Is Google Supposed to Have Done Wrong?
Based on the logic of the case, Google’s “crime” was to offer developers an infrastructure (Android US) and a choice: do business with us (Play Store) in exchange for a 30% cut on transactions, and get instant access to billions of users with built-in discovery, monetization, and security tools; or, deal with users directly through sideloading, which we allow yet discourage.
Thus, Google is being punished for offering a free alternative to Apple’s ecosystem where sideloading is disallowed, but on terms some developers find less attractive than the Play Store. Google is being punished for trying to secure the rewards it earned through the achievement of having created Android and the Play Store.
Google’s appeal to the Supreme Court is their last line of defense. But given the nature of the laws used against them, the company faces an uphill battle.
Arbitrary Antitrust Laws Make Everyone Guilty
The appeals court found that the district jury was correct to find that Google “violated both federal and California antitrust law by willfully acquiring or maintaining monopoly power in [Android app distribution and Android in-app billing services] markets, unreasonably restraining trade, and unlawfully tying use of the Play Store to Google Play Billing.”5
In their defense against the “restraint of trade” charges, Google countered that the court inappropriately delimited the market where Google supposedly holds power to “restrain trade”: the Play Store or Google Pay Billing. After all, Google vehemently competes with Apple products. But the court considered it irrelevant, because the “Google trial focused on gaming within the Android ecosystem” — and within that system, the court held, Google has not made it easy for rival app stores to compete with them.6 But the court provided no good reason to dismiss the relevance of the wider “digital mobile gaming transactions” market in which Google and Apple compete. They offered only this silly analogy:
McDonald’s might compete against Chick-fil-A in the fast-food market yet not compete against Chick-fil-A in the hamburger fast-food market. . . . Although Google and Apple compete for mobile-gaming downloads and mobile-gaming in-app transactions, they do not compete in the Android-only app distribution and in-app billing markets.7
This is a terrible comparison because Google created the Android market — it’s a brand name. If we’re going to use fast food analogies, consider the competition between McDonald’s and In-N-Out. Calling Google a monopolist is like calling McDonald’s a monopolist because it is guilty of restraining competition in the Big Mac market, even though In-N-Out’s Double-Double is a clear alternative to it, even though McDonald’s works with franchisees (as opposed to the “walled garden” of In-N-Out’s fully owned chain) — and even though McDonald’s created the market for Big Macs. And that’s after we ignore that a hungry consumer can choose any non-fast food item, or cook at home. A Fortnite player can find alternative entertainment on PCs, myriad other consoles, VR, or just play boardgames.
It is clearly arbitrary to define the relevant market as the one a company “controls” only because it created it. By such a standard, no product faces any competition by definition, which is an absurd distortion of reality that grants inherently arbitrary power to antitrust prosecutors to target successful companies. The judges know it’s arbitrary, and admit that they’ve defined Android-only app distribution this way only because doing otherwise would “hamstring antitrust jurisprudence.”8
This should strike you as a grim joke on a stand-up comedy stage rather than as a serious argument in court where the rights and justly earned rewards of one of the greatest companies in history are at stake.
But it isn’t a joke. Antitrust laws have been threatening business in the United States with such arbitrariness since 1890. Under these laws, simply offering a product which your customers are free to refuse, whether there is an alternative option or not, is a crime, which means antitrust prosecutors can find a reason to persecute any and every successful business if they wish by delimiting the market until it’s narrow enough to involve little if any competition. While Epic Games carries significant blame, they would have been helpless to exploit Google without the antitrust tools government granted them with which to disarm Google.
Google perfected a market that has not existed before, making mobile gaming possible and profitable. It deserves the freedom and right to control its product and reap the rewards. Epic Games and the like should extend their gratitude, not a court order, to those who opened up a whole mobile gaming industry for them. But only a full rejection of antitrust — a hammer always hovering above the heads of successful businesses — will suffice to protect producers like Google against legally empowered looting.
Robertas Bakula
Robertas Bakula is an Associate Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. He holds a MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from CEVRO Institute in Prague, Czech Republic.
1. Google LLC v. Epic Games, Inc., Petition for a Writ of Certiorari (U.S. Sup. Ct. Oct. 27, 2025).
2. Epic Games, Inc. v. Google LLC, Permanent Injunction (N.D. Cal. Oct. 7, 2024).
3. Meanwhile, Google is also trying to minimize the damage of the permanent injunction through a settlement agreement filed with Epic on Nov. 5th. In the settlement, Google is agreeing to extend the expiration rate of the provisions of the original injunction from three to six years, and add a new provision to cap in-app purchase fees at 9% or 20%, depending on a transaction type (plus 5% fee if developers use Google Play Billing). In exchange, Google asks to remove the most intrusive, complex duties of the original injunction that required Google to grant third-party app stores access to the Play Store’s catalog and permit their distribution directly through the Play Store. Instead, Google would introduce a “registered App Store” process, streamlining installation of certified third-party stores on Android. Epic is on board with the scheme because it would apply globally, not just in the US as the original injunction. Epic also knows that it will easily become one of the few Registered App Stores given their existent audience and market and will benefit from such an arrangement. Judge Donato ordered hearings on the settlement, expressing skepticism that Google and Epic, “two mortal enemies who pounded each other relentlessly in this courtroom for many years – are suddenly BFFs.”
4. Robertas Bakula and Marek Michulka, “How Epic Games Is Looting the Store That Apple Visionaries Built.” New Ideal, July 16, 2025.
5. Epic Games, Inc. v. Google LLC, 24-6256 (9th Cir. July 31, 2025). p. 3.
6. Ibid., p. 23.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 24.
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A hammer?! More like the sword of Damocles.