Google’s Play Store monopoly is coming to an end. A judge in the US ruled that the company must open Android and its app store to competitors’ stores.

A final decision has been made in the case of Google v. Epic. The responsible American court says that Google must effectively open both Android and the Play App Store to competition for a period of three years. As part of this decision, Google is obliged to offer third-party app stores such as the Epic Games Store in Google Play from 2025. The competition must also have access to the full catalog of Google Play apps in order to offer them themselves.

Google vs Epic?

Epic sued Google and Apple in 2020 for removing the game Fortnite from their app stores. This happened because Epic was trying to avoid a 30% fee on in-app purchases. Apple largely won the case, Google started much later and dragged on longer.

Last year, a jury unanimously concluded that Google had an illegal monopoly with its Play Store and that certain deals with game developers and publishers had anti-competitive effects.

Google has eight months to develop a new system. The Company continues to review the security of all digital transactions and may charge a fee for conducting these reviews. Epic also wanted to abolish this control, but that ultimately didn’t happen.

Epic is now filing a second lawsuit against Google because it is allegedly trying to circumvent the measures, The Verge knows. Google is already taking steps to make the integration of external app stores more complex.