Three fixes, one deadline
On August 13-14, 2026, US District Judge James Donato held a compliance hearing in Epic Games v. Google and found that Google's Play Store was still frustrating the antitrust remedy he had already ordered. Epic's counsel demonstrated in open court that searching the Play Store for "store for apps" returned physical retailers like Walmart rather than any competing app marketplace. Donato ordered three specific fixes within one week: rival app stores must appear in ordinary search results for queries like "store for apps" and close variants, not siphoned into a separate banner; and the "View" button Google had substituted for Aptoide — currently the only third-party store live in the Play Store — must revert to a one-tap "Install," matching how any ordinary app installs (TechTimes; Android Authority). The court called the extra tap and the buried search results "anticompetitive friction," and Google's own counsel agreed to the fixes on the record, with contempt proceedings as the backstop if the August 20 deadline slips.
From contract terms to button copy
This is not a new case — it's enforcement of one already won. A San Francisco jury found in December 2023 that Google illegally monopolized Android app distribution, and Donato's permanent injunction, entered October 7, 2024, runs three years from the date Google fully implements it, through November 1, 2027. It barred exclusivity deals, mandatory Play Store preinstallation, and — critically — required Google to build a Play Catalog Access Program letting rival stores access its app catalog (Epic Games v. Google, permanent injunction, N.D. Cal.). The Supreme Court declined to pause any part of that injunction on October 6, 2025, letting it take full effect while Google's appeal proceeded (SCOTUSblog). The catalog program went live July 22, 2026, and Aptoide became the first rival store distributed inside Play in early August. What's new in the August 14 order is the level of granularity: Donato is no longer just policing whether Google allows competitors in structurally — he's now policing how a search algorithm ranks results and what a button says.
The steelman: injunctions are worthless if compliance is cosmetic
There's a real case for this level of scrutiny. A structural remedy that technically opens the door while the interface quietly discourages anyone from walking through it isn't compliance — it's malicious compliance, and courts overseeing consent decrees have long had to guard against exactly that pattern. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in the case, argued that competition rather than a single company's gatekeeping produces better security outcomes for users, rejecting the idea that Google's friction was a neutral safety measure rather than a competitive shield (EFF). If a monopolist found liable at trial can neutralize a court order through search ranking and UX copy instead of contract terms, the remedy is theater. Judges enforcing injunctions have always had to look past formal compliance to substance, and demonstrating in court that a specific search query returns Walmart instead of a competitor is about as concrete an evidentiary record as an antitrust plaintiff can build.
Where the caution belongs
The risk is scope creep. Search ranking and button microcopy are product-design decisions with legitimate, non-anticompetitive versions — a confirmation step before installing software from an unfamiliar source is a defensible security pattern, not inherently a monopolist's trick. Google has argued its friction points served security purposes; the court rejected that justification here, but the line between "anticompetitive friction" and "reasonable caution" will not always be this clean, and a judge is not a product designer. The durable safeguard in this case is that the order is narrowly tethered to an already-adjudicated monopoly finding and a specific evidentiary showing — Epic's lawyers typing a real query into a real search box and getting a bad result — rather than a freestanding mandate that all platforms must design their interfaces a certain way. That distinguishes judicial enforcement of a proven violation from legislative proposals like the Open App Markets Act, which would impose interface rules on every large platform regardless of any adjudicated wrongdoing.
The proportionate reading
Donato's order is best understood as closing a loophole in an existing remedy, not opening a new front where courts routinely referee app design. Enforcement stayed proportionate here because it required Google to lose at trial first, then demonstrate non-compliance with evidence in open court, with contempt — not a fresh injunction — as the next step if Google misses the deadline. That's the model worth defending: antitrust remedies that follow proven conduct and concrete evidence, not standing judicial oversight of how apps are supposed to look. The test now is whether Google's fixes actually surface competitors by August 20, or whether this becomes the first of many hearings litigating pixel-level interface choices.