US judge orders Google to open its app store to rivals

A U.S. judge has ordered Google to open its Android smartphone operating system to rival app stores, in a fresh legal setback for the tech giant.

The order is the result of Google's defeat in an antitrust case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games, where a California jury decided that Google wields illegal monopoly power through its Android Play store.

The San Francisco jury in December took just a few hours to decide against Google, finding that the company had embarked on various illegal strategies to maintain its app store monopoly on Android phones.

The order, which Google is appealing, follows a setback in August when a different federal judge found that Google's world-leading search engine was also an illegal monopoly.

Google is also facing an antitrust lawsuit in a third federal case in Virginia over its dominance of online advertising.

Under the latest order, for the next three years Google will be prohibited from engaging in several practices that were deemed anticompetitive by the jury in the landmark case.

These prohibitions include revenue sharing with potential competitors and requirements that developers launch apps exclusively on the Play Store.

This injunction represents a significant challenge to Google's dominance in the Android app ecosystem and could reshape the mobile app landscape in the coming years.

Phones running on the Android operating system have about a 70 percent share of the world's smartphone market.

Smartphone companies can install the Android app for free under the condition that the Play app store remains on the home page and that other Google offers are pre-installed.