A Court Order That Stops at the Border
On July 22, 2026, Google's Play Catalog Access Program went live in the United States, letting rival Android app stores pull listings directly from Google Play's catalog for the first time. The program exists because Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California issued a permanent injunction against Google on October 7, 2024, after a jury found Google had illegally maintained its Play Store monopoly in Epic Games v. Google. The injunction runs three years, through November 1, 2027, and required Google to open its catalog to competitors rather than forcing every rival store to sideload apps one by one.
Asked when Canadians would get the same access, Google Canada gave MobileSyrup a one-line answer on July 20: it has "no details to share regarding a timeline for Canada getting third-party app store access." That is a notable admission. The Play Catalog Access Program is not a product Google chose to build for consumers everywhere — it is a remedy a US court forced onto Google's US operations specifically. Nothing obligates Google to extend it to Canada on any schedule, and reporting on Google's broader Play Store roadmap points to a full international rollout only by September 2027, more than a year away.
Steelmanning the Delay
There is a real engineering and compliance case for waiting. Catalog-sharing infrastructure has to account for different payment rails, tax remittance rules, and privacy obligations under Canadian law like PIPEDA before Google can safely let a third-party store surface Canadian developers' apps and process Canadian users' payments. Google was first-mover in the US only because a specific injunction bound it there; building the equivalent system for a second jurisdiction, with its own security review and developer opt-out mechanics, is not costless. A rushed Canadian launch that mishandled payment security or developer consent would create exactly the kind of scandal critics of Big Tech would seize on.
But that steelman only explains why a global rollout takes time — it doesn't explain why Canada has no timeline at all, not even a placeholder one, while the US got a hard deadline. The difference isn't engineering. It's that only the US has a court order forcing Google's hand.
Ottawa's Enforcement Gap
Canada's Competition Bureau has shown it will take on Google when it chooses to. On November 28, 2024, the Bureau sued Google at the Competition Tribunal over its advertising-technology stack, seeking an order forcing Google to sell its DFP ad server and AdX exchange. But the Bureau's own 2025–2026 Annual Plan — which prioritizes grocery pricing, housing, banking, telecom, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic pricing — does not name app stores as a focus area at all. Google's mobile app distribution business, the same conduct a US court found monopolistic, sits outside the Bureau's stated digital-markets agenda.
The only Canadian legal challenge to app store gatekeeping right now targets Apple, not Google, and it wasn't brought by the Bureau. The Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) filed an application with the Competition Tribunal in December 2025 alleging Apple's exclusive App Store distribution, mandatory in-app payments, anti-steering rules, and commissions amount to an abuse of dominance under the Competition Act's public-interest provision. The Tribunal confirmed on January 2, 2026 that it has authority to decide whether CIPPIC gets leave to proceed, and issued a further procedural order on April 29, 2026 on Apple's request to file affidavit evidence. CIPPIC is still waiting for a leave ruling, and will be the first institutional public-interest applicant tested against the Tribunal's Martin v Alphabet framework, which requires a genuine competition dispute, a credible applicant interest, and a realistic Canada-specific litigation plan — foreign rulings, the Tribunal has said, "will not carry the evidentiary load."
Even if CIPPIC wins leave and eventually prevails, it targets iOS, not Android. Canadian Android users and third-party store operators would still have no legal lever forcing Google to replicate what US courts already compelled.
Why the Slow Road Is Still the Right One
The instinct in Brussels has been to legislate first and litigate later. The European Commission fined Google €890 million on July 23, 2026 — €460 million for self-preferencing in Search and €430 million for restricting alternative purchase channels on Google Play — under the Digital Markets Act's ex ante conduct rules, which apply regardless of a proven competitive harm in any specific case. That model delivers faster, more uniform results, but it also imposes broad compliance obligations on product design decisions that may not always harm competition, and it hands enormous discretionary power to a regulator rather than a court weighing evidence.
Canada's case-by-case abuse-of-dominance model, run through the Competition Tribunal rather than a standing digital-markets regulator, is the more proportionate design — it requires an applicant to actually prove harm on a Canadian record before any remedy issues. But proportionate and slow are not the same thing as effective, and right now the model is producing a coverage gap: Apple faces a live challenge, Google's app store conduct does not, and Canadian consumers are left dependent on a law clinic's litigation budget and a company's undisclosed international rollout schedule. The Bureau doesn't need a DMA to close that gap — it could open its own inquiry into Play Store distribution the way it already has for ad tech. Until it does, or until Google names a date, Canadian developers get to watch American rivals hand-picked by a court get the reforms Ottawa hasn't yet asked for.