For the first time a rival app store appears inside Google Play

On Monday 10 August, Aptoide Games appeared inside Google Play. It is the first time in over a decade that a competing app store has sat on Google's platform, which had in the meantime shut rivals out of its catalogue. For now availability is limited to the United States.

Aptoide is a Portuguese company and runs one of the largest Android app marketplaces outside Google Play: more than forty thousand applications and around twenty-five million monthly active users. The American market is its biggest, but until now anyone wanting to install it had to resort to sideloading, the manual procedure that requires downloading an installation file, allowing unknown sources in the phone's settings and accepting the security warnings the system displays along the way. A path most users do not take.

The ruling that opened the door

The opening stems from the case Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, brought against Google in 2020, accusing it of anticompetitive conduct in the Android ecosystem. A jury found for Epic in 2023, Google lost its appeal in 2025, and district judge James Donato imposed a set of remedies, among them the obligation to allow the installation of apps and stores originating outside the Play Store.

Since 22 June 2026 Google has operated the Play Catalog Access Program, which lets third-party stores reach Google Play's infrastructure and catalogue while remaining independent. Within the same framework the company cut its own store's commission to twenty per cent. Aptoide is the first operator to use the opening.

What actually changes will depend on user behaviour. The ruling removes a technical obstacle; it does not create demand. For years the barrier to installing alternative stores coincided with the absence of reasons to look for them, since the most widely used apps are all on Play. The possible lever is price, if competing stores kept lower commissions and developers passed the difference on to users. The precedent, at any rate, is set: after ten years the door is open, and Aptoide is the first through it.