The App Store on Your Phone Is Full of Junky Crap. That Could Be on the Brink of Changing.

There’s a middleman living in your phone. Tech giants Google and Apple don’t just make the phones, they make money when you do various things on them. Take their app stores, which you have to use if you want your phone to do anything fun. If you purchase a game or a fitness app in them, Google and Apple get a slice of your credit card payment. It goes further: If you purchase an app, and then make a purchase within an app, they get a slice of that, too—as much as a whopping 30 percent of your payment.

It’s a system that has left the app stores full of junk, says Anil Dash, who runs the coding platform Glitch. On your phone, you can find A.I.–generated apps, rip-offs, and kinda-scammy games galore. What’s not junk is often made by a megacorporation; it’s just too difficult for midsized players to make money to support the development of new and exciting apps. “It’s a pretty grim space,” says Dash.

But now Epic Games—arguably a tech giant in its own right—has managed to land a blow against this system by winning the sympathies of a jury in San Francisco. The jury found that Google has abused its monopoly power in the app store and in-app billing markets. In January, a federal judge will start deliberating about legal remedies. (Google has also said it will appeal.) While it may be a while before Android users notice any changes, the end of the app economy’s two-party system is over. A new era of apps is on the horizon.

Before we dive into what that looks like, let me make sure you’re acquainted with Epic Games (which, by the way, in winning an antitrust lawsuit against Google, has successfully done what the U.S. government is also currently attempting to do). Epic Games is nowhere near the size of Google, which is a $1.67 trillion company with more dominant businesses than you can imagine. But Epic is still huge, a $32 billion brand, and ubiquitous with young people around the world. Its crown jewel, the thing really raking in the cash, is Fortnite. The battle royale fighting game is much more than a game—Marshmello, Travis Scott, Ariana Grande, and Eminem have all played virtual concerts there. Within this world, Fortnite sells a virtual currency called V-Bucks that players can use to buy different outfits, dance moves for their avatars, and other fun stuff. But much of that sweet, sweet video game merch money—what was spent when users were on iPhones and Android devices—was subject to Apple and Google’s cut.

Epic didn’t like that status quo, so, in the summer of 2020, it broke both companies’ rules by introducing its own payment system that circumvented those charges. Fortnite was summarily removed from both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. The gaming company responded by suing under federal antitrust law, which is designed to prevent companies from unfairly hurting competition. Epic (mostly) lost its bench trial against Apple in 2021, but its battle with Google wore on—until this week. The news that Epic won against Google was shocking to many onlookers. (It’s not a David-and-Goliath situation, exactly, because again, Epic is big; it’s more like Perseus beheading Medusa.)

What happens next? When U.S. District Judge James Donato resumes court proceedings to figure out legal solutions in the new year, he’ll have options. Epic notably did not seek monetary damages in suing Google, preferring to ask for real changes to how Google operates rather than simply extracting buckets of cash. Epic wants developers to be able to list their apps on the Google Play Store—with lower fees, of course—but it also wants the freedom to offer users its own app store and billing system.

Depending on what Donato decides, Android users may one day find that they suddenly have more options for downloading and purchasing from alternative app stores, paying for apps, or making in-app purchases, says Diana Moss, vice president and director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute. “That would be a welcome surprise in a world where consumers face two dominant smartphone manufacturers,” she says.

In that future, users could shop around for deals or find offerings in categories that are largely taboo for Apple and Google—including adult content. “OnlyFans could easily be an app store,” says Dash.

Epic’s win might not immediately and directly usher us to that future, however. Moss says she expects that Donato may opt for the lowest-hanging fruit, perhaps by issuing an injunction against Google’s exclusive contracts with prominent app makers like Netflix. Google differs from Apple in that it technically allows third-party app stores and the ability to download mobile software from the web rather than going through the Play Store. But Epic successfully argued that Google was open in name only. If a rival app store can’t offer popular apps like Netflix, how is that rival store supposed to have any success? It would be like a bookstore that can’t carry romance novels, or anything by Colleen Hoover.

A subtle solution, one that still leaves Apple and Google with control (if maybe with some new app stores popping up alongside theirs), might actually be most beneficial to consumers. Apple and Google have argued that cracks in their app stores would mean lower quality and degraded security. Phillip Shoemaker, who helped build Apple’s App Store, said he agrees entirely with that argument.

“This revenue keeps [Apple] with a well-staffed team which spends their days looking at the apps for security and safety concerns, and enables a security team to always be investigating security concerns,” according to Shoemaker, who is now the executive director of the digital-identification company Identity.com. “Having said that, both of these companies are making more money than necessary to meet the security and safety concerns.” Shoemaker thinks that Apple could afford to operate with something like 5 percent for in-app purchases rather than the 15–30 percent cut it currently takes for developers. It might, in other words, be a good thing if users don’t notice major changes on their phones as a result of this trial.

Thomas Lenard, a senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, basically shares this view. “If there is a remedy that fragments the operating system and makes it less secure or less user-friendly in other ways, that obviously is not in the interest of consumers,” he says. “Similarly, if Google has less of an incentive to keep improving the platform, that would also not benefit consumers.”

Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, likewise notes that some changes that could hypothetically result from this trial might make the user experience demonstrably worse. “Opening up is not necessarily a better thing. People love Apple products because of the ease of not thinking about it,” he says. Consumers “tend to like things that are more easily integrated.”

A dip in what Apple and Google skim off the top of sales might still remake the app store experience, at least when it comes to what we see on the shelves there. Dash says that many of the most important tech companies right now couldn’t be built on today’s mobile app infrastructure because the 30 percent margins are so prohibitive. “Adobe is a multibillion-dollar company—Photoshop is a household verb—and you couldn’t build an Adobe on one of the app stores,” he says. “Nobody has turned a Google Play or App Store app into something that has an enterprise sales team and has its own campus.”

Dash thinks that, whether from the Epic decision or the sort of government regulation that has already arrived in some form in South Korea and Europe, the era of centralized control by two firms over the app economy is coming to an end. And with the tech behemoths slightly restrained, subtle changes are almost sure to grace our phones, one way or another.