Google was forced to open the Play Store. A Lisbon company walked in first

Aptoide Games, the specialised games marketplace run by the Portuguese company Aptoide, is now listed on Google Play in the United States. Users search for it, tap install, and get a second app shop on the phone. No sideloading, no APK file.

The Verge called it the first rival Android app store to arrive inside the Play Store itself.

Aptoide dates back to 2009. The company claims around 25 million monthly active users and more than 400,000 Android applications. The United States is its largest market. It distributed through Google Play in Android’s early years, by its own account. Then Google’s rules on competing stores pushed it out.

The door a court prised open

Google did not do this by choice. A US judge ruled in 2024 that Play had to open to rival stores. Google appealed and lost. It then tried to settle globally with Epic Games instead. Judge James Donato voiced repeated scepticism about the joint proposal, and on 15 July the two sides withdrew it altogether.

That left the original injunction standing. The rules took effect on 22 July. Epic had already won its narrower fight to get Fortnite back onto Google Play. Aptoide is the first company to use the wider opening.

Google set the price of entry

The mechanism is the Play Catalog Access program, and Google’s own documentation sets the terms. A store pays $5,000 for the security and policy review at onboarding, then renews every year to keep access.

The conditions are tighter still. Applicants must register as an organisation and target US users. They may not use the Play catalogue to distribute apps outside the United States. They may not charge users extra fees for anything available only through that catalogue. Malware has to stay under 1% on a 30-day rolling basis. No store may hand catalogue data to another.

So the shelf opens. It opens on Google’s terms, at Google’s price, in one country.

Lisbon already had the other half

Aptoide arrives with unusual credentials. Apple approved it as one of the few independent operators running an alternative iOS marketplace in the EU. That came under the Digital Markets Act, the regime Apple fought and lost in court. It runs that marketplace in Europe today. Japan and Brazil have picked it for comparable programmes too.

“This is much more than a product launch,” said Paulo Trezentos, Aptoide’s chief executive and co-founder. “More than ten years ago, Android users lost the ability to discover alternative app stores through Google Play. Today, that changes.”

Chief operating officer Álvaro Pinto put the commercial case more plainly. “Developers should have multiple ways to reach users, and users should have genuine freedom to choose where they discover applications.”

Who walks through next

Google appears to have built a dedicated section inside Play for third-party stores, which suggests Aptoide will not be the only tenant. Epic’s own store is the obvious candidate. Amazon and Samsung already ship shops on their own hardware and could list them more widely. Microsoft’s long-delayed Xbox mobile store now has a route in.

Plenty of caveats survive the milestone. Aptoide Games sells games only. Play carries it in the United States alone, though anyone can still sideload it elsewhere. Google Play remains the default on every Android phone, and Aptoide is little known outside developer circles. Its fifteen years of malware scanning, developer verification and app validation are claims the company makes about itself.

Regulators elsewhere are still pushing at the same door, from the EU to South Korea. What changed on Monday is smaller and stranger than the antitrust rhetoric suggested. A rival shop opened inside the shop, in one country, for $5,000 a year.