On October 1, 2026, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that Google has begun letting rival, third-party app stores be distributed through the Google Play Store, and that developers now have new options for billing and distributing apps. The change follows years of litigation by Epic Games, which alleged that Google restricted alternative stores, limited developer distribution choices and imposed in-app payment rules and fees. The EFF piece does not discuss Brazil. The comparison below is ours, and it is worth making because Brazil is running a parallel experiment through a different legal tool.
The case for hard rules
The strongest argument for an ex ante gatekeeper regime is speed and certainty. Antitrust cases about app stores take years. Epic's suit against Google ran long enough that the remedy arrives long after the conduct began. A statute that sets duties in advance, such as non-discrimination, interoperability and no anti-steering rules, spares every complainant from proving dominance case by case. That is a serious argument, and Brazil's government has acted on it.
What Brazil has already done
Brazil's competition authority, CADE, has not waited for a statute. On December 23, 2025, its tribunal approved a cease-and-desist agreement (TCC) with Apple that resolved an investigation opened in December 2022 after a complaint by Mercado Livre. According to CADE's announcement, Apple must allow alternative app stores, let developers steer users to external purchases, decouple its payment processing from in-app transactions, and show competing payment options side by side with its own. Apple had 105 days to implement the changes. The agreement runs for three years from the date the new terms become mandatory for developers. Total non-compliance carries a fine of up to R$150 million and the reopening of the investigation.
The Google settlement is narrower. On December 10, 2025, CADE homologated a TCC with Google over three Android contracts: the anti-fragmentation agreement, the mobile application distribution agreement (MADA) and the revenue sharing agreement. The concern was that access to Google Play licensing was tied to pre-installing or prominently placing Google Search and Chrome. The obligations bar that conditioning, bar retaliation against manufacturers that decline, and remove exclusivity from revenue-sharing payments. That announcement does not address alternative store distribution through Google Play. Brazil's Google remedy is therefore about device-maker contracts, not about the Play Store opening that EFF describes in the US.
The contrast matters. The US remedy came from a court after a trial. Brazil's Apple remedy came from a negotiated settlement, and its Google remedy fixed a different layer of the stack. Neither needed a new statute.
What Bill 4,675/2025 adds
The government's Digital Markets Bill, presented on September 26, 2025, would create a Digital Markets Superintendency inside CADE. It would designate platforms of systemic relevance and impose special obligations on them. The thresholds are global gross revenue above R$50 billion a year or revenue above R$5 billion a year in Brazil. A designation would last up to ten years, renewable, and would cover the designated firm's entire economic group. The obligations include transparency, data portability, interoperability and bans on discriminatory practices. Penalties for non-compliance include daily fines that can rise to R$1 million a day.
The bill does not duplicate what CADE has done. It would make such outcomes repeatable without a new investigation each time. That is a real benefit, and the Google Play shift shows the underlying idea is sound: opening distribution lets competition happen on privacy, security and fees, not only on catalog. EFF's authors put it this way: "Competition in the app store market therefore means competition not only over which apps are offered, the user experience, and developer fees, but also over privacy and security."
Where proportionality should bite
Three design points deserve attention as Congress considers the text.
First, thresholds define who is regulated, so they should track market power, not size. Revenue cutoffs catch firms that are large but not gatekeepers of anything. The designation process should require a showing of entrenched control over a specific service, such as an operating system or app store, with obligations tailored to that service. A ten-year designation of a whole economic group is a blunt instrument for businesses that change every few years.
Second, remedies should be tested against evidence. The Apple and Google agreements have monitoring periods and a three-year horizon. A statute should keep that discipline: obligations that sunset or get reviewed, and a record on whether prices fell, whether alternative stores gained users, and whether security incidents rose. If rivals on Android show little uptake, the lesson is that choice alone does not move markets, and the rules should be rewritten, not expanded.
Third, security and privacy cut both ways. Open distribution lets users leave a store that tracks them or censors apps, which is a free-expression gain. It also lets malicious software in more easily. Brazil's rules should require disclosure and user-friendly warnings, not blanket bans on platform safeguards, and should leave room for platforms to protect users in ways that do not foreclose rivals.
Takeaway
The US Google Play shift is early evidence that mandated openness can be implemented in practice. Brazil gets there by a faster route: settlements enforced by an agency with a monitored timeline. The Digital Markets Bill should codify that approach, with narrow designation criteria, service-specific duties and built-in review, and should avoid becoming a general license to micromanage product design. Competition in app stores is worth having. The way to get it is rules that are specific, measurable and reversible if they fail.