Are Third Party App Stores Too Hidden In The Play Store? - DTNS 5332

**Jason Howell** (0:08)
This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 14th, 2026 We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context of all of it, and help each other understand.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (0:16)
Today, a judge tells Google that those third-party app stores are too difficult to install from the Google Play Store.

**Jason Howell** (0:22)
Too difficult, make them easier.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (0:24)
Too hard.

**Jason Howell** (0:25)
I'm Jason Howell.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (0:26)
I'm Huyen Tue Dao.

**Jason Howell** (0:28)
Let's start with what you need to know with a big story.
Yes, US. District Judge James Donato has given Google one week to remove some of what he called barriers that are making rival Android app stores harder to both find and install inside of the Google Play Store. Google officially started showing third-party app stores inside of Google Play. Well, we saw the first one earlier this week through a dedicated landing page inside of the app. First app store to appear inside of the app, it's like Inception, was Aptoid Games. But the way to get to those app store listings inside of the app store required either a direct link or a specific search query to locate them. And Judge Donato doesn't like the friction of the process. He shared that searches like store for apps still didn't pull back those stores in search. In fact, Epic's lawyer, Yonathan Evan ran that search. And instead of getting third party app stores, ended up getting a result for Walmart. So, you know, the search was store for apps. And then you get a Walmart result in return, which is a little weird. Donato said that, quote, every possible variation that's even only 70% properly phrased, end quote, should return store results. That makes a lot of sense to me. And that they should be presented just like standard apps with an install button in results instead of a view button that still required someone to click through one more time to install them, right? Google argued that the added step actually protects users.
But Donato said it was actually just kind of an example of anti-competitive friction. Donato has given Google until August 20th to make the appropriate changes. Google says it will address it 20th, you know, it's basically seven days away. So it's kind of like one of those situations of like, all right, you told us to make sure that these third-party app stores are in our app store, we did that.
But, you know, did you say how easy it had to be to find it? Maybe, maybe somewhere in the details, it actually did spell this out, but kind of seems to me like, like I don't know that I necessarily believe that Google was like, we're going to make this really, really hard to find. But they probably didn't go above and beyond to make it easy to find.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (2:59)
That's where I'm at. I actually, this is not really fair, but I thought it was funny because I was thinking about when I'm visiting my sister and her kids and we're like, hey, we're going to go to the store and my niece doesn't want to go. And eventually we convince her to go to the store, but then she refuses to put her shoes on or something like that. But that's not really fair. But I agree with you.
It's probably more like, and I've been in companies like this where we have something, I think I remember a little bit GDPR days where I think there is levels of meeting a legal requirement or legal ruling. And I mean, to be fair, like you probably just want to do what you want to fall. You want to not get in trouble. You want to do the thing. But there is a level of, let's make this the best experience possible that may or may not be there. I mean, I know that some of our GDP are actually really to try really hard, but I could see with this that they were like, well, it's there. And to be fair, I did try, I remember for Android Facebook, I did try to install Apptoid, and I did get confused.

**Jason Howell** (3:49)
Oh really?

**Huyen Tue Dao** (3:50)
I did get confused for a minute because, yeah.

**Jason Howell** (3:52)
Oh yeah, no.

**Huyen Tue Dao** (3:53)
Oh no, even just typing in Apptoid, you don't see the Apptoid store, at least when I did it Tuesday for our show. When you type in Apptoid, it does show a tiny little message box that says something about third-party stores, go to the store page, but then the actual Apptoid store doesn't show up in the results for literally Apptoid.