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The $800M question: Epic v Google's hearing and Android steering
By UA Ledger staff — Archive date: 3 min read
An $800M Epic-Google deal surfaced at the Epic v Google settlement hearing. Judge Donato flagged a possible quid pro quo; the 2024 injunction stands.
An evidentiary hearing before Judge James Donato on January 22, covering the proposed settlement between Epic Games and Google over the Play Store, surfaced a detail that hadn't previously reached the public record: an $800 million commercial partnership between Epic and Google, agreed alongside the settlement talks. Donato flagged the possibility that the partnership functioned as a quid pro quo tied to Epic's litigation position, and the FTC formally objected to the settlement on the same grounds.
None of this touches the injunction.
The October 2024 ruling that bars Google from taxing link-outs and enforcing anti-steering restrictions on Android's Play Store remains in force whatever happens to the proposed settlement, which was meant to resolve the remaining disputes between the two companies rather than the injunction itself.
Android steering: what it means for buyers
The injunction is the part of this case that changed how Android UA and monetisation work, because it opened the door to link-out payment flows outside Google's own billing system, and that hasn't moved. The open question is different. Does Epic and Google's private commercial arrangement compromise the terms under which the broader settlement gets approved? That matters to Epic's litigation posture far more than to a UA team's day-to-day Android setup.
Keep planning around the injunction as it stands. It isn't what this hearing contests; the settlement's fate is a separate, slower-moving story. A judge expressing scepticism about a side deal is not a judge reopening the injunction, and conflating the two reads more urgency into this development than the facts support.
The injunction's practical shape is already familiar to any team that adjusted its Play Store build after October 2024: an in-app button or banner directing a user to an external payment page, with Google barred from penalising the app for including it or from charging a service fee on transactions completed there. Nothing since Donato's hearing has required a code change to that mechanism, and neither the FTC's objection nor the disclosed side deal touches how the button behaves. Still weighing whether to add or expand a link-out flow on Android? Treat the settlement noise as background reading, not a reason to hold off implementation work the injunction already permits.
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