Epic and Google Reach Third-party App Store Peace - DTNS 5219
Daily Tech News Show
Tom Merritt
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Plus, the new Nothing 4a Pro is out, and Tom was right about Anthropic.
Starring Tom Merritt and Jenn Cutter.
Show notes can be found here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 5th, 2026. |
| 0:10.7 | We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context, and try to help each other understand. |
| 0:15.1 | Today, have Epic and Google reached a final third-party piece, and oh my gosh, Fortnite is back, or at least |
| 0:22.8 | heading back to the play store. |
| 0:24.5 | If the piece holds, folks. |
| 0:26.7 | We'll find out. |
| 0:28.1 | I'm Tom Merritt. |
| 0:29.3 | I'm Jen Cutter. |
| 0:30.5 | Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. |
| 0:34.8 | So yeah, this has been going on for a while, but for those of you who have either forgotten or never knew, Google and Epic have been fighting over the third-party app store since 2020, and they announced updates to their agreement on third-party apps and payment systems on Google's version of Android today, March 5th. |
| 0:57.1 | Now, this is a response to multiple court cases around the world, but most prominently, the 2023 decision in a lawsuit brought by Epic that Google had abused its market position. |
| 1:07.1 | And as one remedy determined by the judge in 2024, Google must distribute third-party |
| 1:14.3 | app stores. |
| 1:15.5 | Now, Epic and Google decided they didn't exactly like the remedies that Judge Donato had given them. |
| 1:21.9 | So they created their own settlement and said, hey, Epic's the one that brought the case. |
| 1:26.4 | If we agree on this, this is cool, right? And Judge James Donato said, hey, Epic's the one that brought the case. If we agree on this, |
| 1:34.5 | this is cool, right? And Judge James Donato said, I don't know. I'm a little skeptical. This agreement seems to benefit Epic more than it would other developers. And you know what I am? I'm a |
| 1:40.0 | judge. So I'm here to make sure that the law is applied for all. Maybe go back and look at this again. |
| 1:46.5 | So the two companies went back to the drawing board and today announced adjustments to their |
| 1:50.6 | settlement, which they have now submitted again for Judge Donato's approval. And it seems like |
| 1:57.0 | all the people that have been following this court case feel like it's probably going to pass |
| 2:01.2 | this time. Here's what the proposed settlement includes. Developers will be allowed to steer users |
... |
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