The judges may keep telling the walled gardeners that they have to free things up and throw a few doors open, but they in turn keep finding ways to keep their walls as high as they can get away with.

You can justify just about anything on the grounds that your intentions are to keep the users safe. Walled software gardens are supposed to be safe for innocents to wander round and smell the flowers, but we all know that safety is relative and in some cases poorly judged. So back in October 2025 Google was issued with a Ninth Circuit Court Permanent Injunction to allow other app stores to function without unreasonable barriers. This docement does say that Google can take reasonable measures to make sure that the apps are acceptable and:

"Google may require app developers and app store owners to pay a reasonable fee for these services, which must be based on Google’s actual costs."

Now Google has quietly released details of what it plans to do, by way of a new program that you have to enroll in by January 28th. Basically its business as usual, but with a lower cost. Google expects you to submit every app for checking and all apps have to comply with the Play Developer Policies and pay Google per install.  Googles review process is often described as "brutal" and "opaque" by programmers who have been on the rough end of its bureaucracy.

With Google as the gatekeeper to the Play store and to any alternative stores that might be set up, this is still a very walled garden - only now the wall now goes round extra bits of land that you happen to want to cultivate. The position of gatekeeper means that Google can use all of the information about what different developers are doing and even use it to pressure developers to do its bidding by simply making the approval process slower.  And for this privilege they want to charge between $2 to $3 per install! This also provides them with insights into what is selling well. 

Finally there is a clause which reads:

"Provide direct, publicly accessible customer support to end users through readily accessible communication channels."

If that doesn't send you laughing all the way to Google's programmer relations page, then I don't know what will. The difficulties in getting in touch with Google for urgent and serious problems is legendary - perhaps we can claim that Google isn't meeting its own conditions.

We will have to wait and see if there is any reaction from the three-person technical committee that is supposed to oversee what Google offers - one person nominated by Google, one by Epic and the third to be agreed by the first two. Sounds like a recipe for deadlock to me.

More Information

Enrolling in the external content links programme for users in the US

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