Google Play Store opens to rivals starting July 22

Epic Games and Google have jointly pulled the plug on the settlement they spent months negotiating, a reversal that forces Google back under the original October 2024 court injunction it had been trying to soften.

Starting July 22, rival app stores will operate inside the US Google Play Store itself.

According to an article in The Verge, Google has confirmed that it will be supporting third-party app stores in its Play Store by including the entire app catalogue in their enrolment programme.

For all US-based apps and games, the inclusion will happen automatically unless the developer chooses not to be part of the catalogue sharing, which means that the inclusion happens by default.

This is the "store-in-store" concept, where competitors such as the Epic Games Store or the Microsoft Store are integrated into Play Store without having to sideload.

The two companies had proposed a settlement late last year that would have let Google avoid carrying competing app stores altogether, offering developers more payment flexibility instead.

That deal had taken shape amid the announcement of an $800 million collaboration between Epic Games and Google around the same time.

Pulling back on it now would mean Google has to return to the more stringent conditions imposed by the original injunction: hosting competing Android app stores for a few years and making its whole collection available to them.

Dan Jackson, who is a spokesperson for Google, said the two firms decided to pull back on the motion in order to avoid further proceedings that would create uncertainty within the ecosystem.