Google accused of overcharging 20 million UK consumers over Play Store fees

Google is defending a £1.2B claim at London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal brought for about 20 million British consumers who say Play Store commissions of up to 30% were passed into the prices they paid since October 2015. It settled an equivalent claim from UK app developers for £260M six weeks ago without admitting wrongdoing.

Google is defending a £1.2B claim in London brought for about 20 million British consumers over Play Store commissions. Six weeks ago it agreed to pay £260M to settle a claim from the developers who paid those commissions. It is contesting this one.

Liz Coll is the class representative, the class covers purchases from 1 October 2015 to 31 July 2026, and the trial at the Competition Appeal Tribunal is listed for seven weeks, as Bloomberg reported. The case is that a levy of up to 30% ended up in the prices consumers paid.

Google says it is not dominant in the market for facilitating digital content transactions between developers and consumers, and has asked for the claim to be dismissed.

It made a similar argument to the developers and settled anyway.

We reported in August that Google would pay £260M to settle a claim brought by the competition academic Barry Rodger for UK businesses that sold apps between August 2018 and July 2026. Of that, £160M went to developers and £100M to costs, with no admission of wrongdoing.

The consumer claim is nearly five times that, and reaches back almost three years further.

Lawyers for the class told the tribunal that Google has “exploited its market strength to extract unfair prices” and generated extraordinary returns for almost two decades. Google says Android gives people more choice than any other mobile platform, and that Play offers “some of the lowest fees in the market“.

The regulator has already settled part of this argument.

The Competition and Markets Authority found that Apple and Google run an effective duopoly, gave both strategic market status this year, and proposed letting developers send users to cheaper checkouts.

That changes the future rather than the past.

Brussels took the money route instead, fining Google €890M in July, of which €430M was for stopping Play developers pointing users towards cheaper channels elsewhere.

None of that reaches the people who paid.

An EU consumer cannot bring Coll’s claim, because only non-profits may file representative actions there, and in Ireland a statute from 1634 still blocks the litigation funding they would need to do it.