The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Californiaruling, Google must open its Google Play Store resources to Epic Games to facilitate Epic Games' application services on this service platform, and Google said it will appeal.
Prior to this, Epic Games filed a lawsuit against Google for violating market competition.Initiate a lawsuit, and even accused Samsung, believing that the two platform operators tried to make the Epic Games Store application service difficult to install and use on the Android platform.
Epic Games said that Samsung has added an automatic installation blocking mechanism to its new mobile devices, which by default only allows users to download and install application services through the Google Play Store or Samsung's Samsung Galaxy Store. Unless the user manually turns off the automatic installation blocking mechanism, third-party applications will not be installed.
Although there is no direct evidence, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney believes that Google and Samsung are working together to restrict users from installing and using third-party applications obtained from other channels.
Earlier, Judge James Donard of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California pointed out that Google violated the market monopoly, believing that Google did use payment to allow its services to be pre-installed on the Google Play Store on products manufactured by hardware manufacturers. It also required service providers to use the Google Play Store payment service for in-app transactions, and prohibited the promotion of more favorable app content purchase information through websites, etc., and even used payment to allow specific apps to be listed exclusively or preemptively on the Google Play Store platform, or to avoid competition from similar Google Play Store platform services.
Therefore, the court requires Google to allow third-party software market services to be listed on the Google Play Store, and also to allow such services to access Google Play Store related resources.
Google will subsequently review the court's ruling.lodge an appeal, and requested that all rulings be suspended during the appeal period, emphasizing that the court's ruling will weaken the competitiveness of the Android and iOS platforms. Although it will allow Epic Games to obtain the results it expects, it will significantly affect the balance of market competition and the related rights and interests of consumers, developers, and hardware companies.
As for Tim Sweeney, he later explained that the Epic Games Store is expected to be available on the Google Play Store in 2025, and Epic Games has earlier successfully brought its game market service to the iOS platform in the European Union.
Big news! The Epic Games Store and other app stores are coming to the Google Play Store in 2025 in the USA – without Google's scare screens and Google's 30% app tax – thanks to victory in Epic v Google.https://t.co/1g6uuw1CJB
- Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) October 7, 2024
