In a San Francisco courtroom on Thursday, a lawyer picked up his phone and searched the Google Play Store for "app store." What came back was not Aptoide Games — the first third-party store that Google had been ordered to include — but a vague banner asking whether the user might, perhaps, be looking for something else. That small demonstration, staged by Epic Games attorney Yonatan Even, captured a much larger legal battle that has been running since Google lost a landmark antitrust case in 2023. US District Judge James Donato, who is overseeing the remedy phase of that case, was not impressed.

He ruled that Google had introduced what he called unnecessary "anticompetitive friction" into the very process it had been ordered to make simple. Aptoide Games is technically available through the Play Store, but reaching it requires navigating several layers of menus that most users would never think to explore. Even a direct search for the store's name failed to return it as a clear result — a failure that, in any ordinary search context, would be considered a basic malfunction. The ruling is significant because it goes beyond the question of whether Google technically complied.

Judge Donato is insisting on the spirit of the remedy: that rival stores should be genuinely discoverable, not merely present. Google has long resisted this outcome, and at one point attempted to negotiate a settlement with Epic specifically designed to keep third-party stores out of the Play Store altogether. What makes the case particularly complex is that Google and Epic have simultaneously announced a global partnership agreement, meaning the two companies are cooperating in some markets while remaining adversaries in a US courtroom.