Supreme Court, for Now, Rejects Google Bid to Block Changes to App Store

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an emergency request from Google to prevent it from being forced to make a series of changes to its Play app store, effectively opening it up to competition.

The court’s order did not provide reasoning or a vote count, as is typical in such emergency rulings.

The decision clears the way for a lower court’s order to go into effect as planned on Oct. 22. In a long-running dispute between Google and the creator of the Fortnite video game, the trial judge ordered Google to stop requiring developers to use its app store to bill for payments, allowing them to provide other ways to pay and to set their own prices, among other changes.

The court’s emergency action dealt with the impending deadline but did not resolve the underlying dispute, which could return to the justices for further consideration. In its emergency application last month, Google said it planned to seek full review by the Supreme Court by Oct. 27. If the justices agreed to hear the case, it could be argued before the court this term.

The fight began in 2018, when Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, released the popular game as a smartphone app. The company first distributed the game through direct downloads and the Samsung Galaxy Store, but eventually offered it on Google Play.

But the game maker embedded secret code in the app’s software that allowed players to circumvent Google’s required payment-processing systems, which charged a 30 percent commission. Epic Games created a plan to counter the app store requirements, code-naming it Project Liberty.

Tim Sweeney, the chief executive and founder of Epic Games, asked Fortnite customers to pay the game maker directly through in-app purchases. Google then removed the game from its app store, claiming that Epic had violated the company’s terms of service.

Epic Games sued under the antitrust laws, arguing that Google maintained a monopoly in the smartphone app store market and had engaged in anticompetitive conduct.

After a trial, a jury found in 2023 that Google had violated antitrust laws, extracting fees and limiting competition from Epic Games and other developers on Play.

Last October, Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered Google to change the way that Play functioned, opening it to competition. The judge required Google to allow developers to be able to bring their own app stores onto the Android mobile operating system for three years. He also required the company to allow app makers to charge users with their own billing systems, outside the Android ecosystem.

In July, a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the verdict. In their ruling, the judges found the case “replete with evidence that Google’s anticompetitive conduct entrenched its dominance, causing the Play Store to benefit from network effects.”

On Sept. 24, the tech giant filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court, urging it to intervene immediately in the case and stop the judge’s order from going into effect. In a brief filed to the justices, lawyers for Google argued that the lower-court order would require the company “to incur immediate, substantial and unrecoverable expenses in modifying its products.”

The company also argued that changes to the app store could open it — and its users — to security threats, including “stolen data,” “blackmail and surveillance that has irrevocable, real-world consequences on users’ careers or personal lives.”

In response, lawyers for Epic Games argued that Google had “unlawfully suppressed competition” using an “unlawfully maintained monopoly” to extract tens of billions of dollars from app developers and users. The company also told the court that Google’s warnings of security threats were overblown.