A federal judge just ordered Google, again, to stop making it hard to install rival app stores on Android.
In a San Francisco courtroom, Judge James Donato told Google to carry competing Android app stores inside Google Play itself and to give those rivals more complete access to Play's catalog and update mechanisms. The order comes barely a month after Epic Games and Google seemed to have called a truce in their long-running fight over Android app distribution. It also lands nearly three years after a jury found Google ran an illegal monopoly over how Android apps get installed, and almost two years after Donato first ruled that breaking that monopoly meant forcing open the distribution pipeline, not just fining Google for it.
The real story here is enforcement, not the verdict. Plenty of monopoly rulings stall at the please-comply stage. Donato is instead ordering Google to build the machinery that lets competitors piggyback on its own storefront. That is a sharper remedy than what Epic got against Apple in a parallel case, where the App Store stayed largely intact and only payment links opened up. Telling Google in court that "that is not acceptable" suggests Donato has lost patience with slow-walking.
Expect Google to appeal, and expect the actual rollout of easier rival store installs to take a while. Court orders and shipped software rarely move at the same speed.