2025-08-01 02:31:04
Following an appeals court victory on Thursday, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted that “the Epic Games Store for Android will be coming to the Google Play Store.” This is despite Google’s plan to appeal the Ninth Circuit panel’s decision, which declined to overturn a 2023 jury verdict that Google’s app store and payment system had become illegal monopolies.
There’s no detail yet on timing, but it would make accessing Fortnite and other Epic-distributed games much simpler on Android devices, without relying on sideloading or making deals with phone manufacturers to preload the store. On iPhone and iPad, the mobile version of the Epic Games Store is still only available in the European Union, but Android users could sideload it from the web since the apps launched last fall.
Epic may not be the only company to put a rival app store inside of Google’s Play Store in the near future. The Ninth Circuit appears to have lifted a stay on the entire permanent injunction that Epic won against Google’s app store monopolies, and that injunction would force Google to crack open Android for other third-party stores as well. “The stay is lifted,” Epic spokesperson Cat McCormack confirms to The Verge.
The Epic Games Store on Android maintains your persistent status in games across platforms, and earlier this year, the company brought its weekly free games program to the mobile stores, too. It also has other Epic games, like Fall Guys and Rocket League Sideswipe.
In a statement provided to The Verge, Google’s global head of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said, “This decision will significantly harm user safety, limit choice, and undermine the innovation that has always been central to the Android ecosystem. Our top priority remains protecting our users, developers and partners, and maintaining a secure platform as we continue our appeal.”
2025-08-01 02:10:40
Aaron Sorkin is writing and directing a follow-up to The Social Network, and Jeremy Strong is reportedly the lead candidate to play Mark Zuckerberg. “Sources say no formal offer has been presented but that he is the top choice to play the Facebook founder,” according to Deadline. Jesse Eisenberg played the role in the first film.
Deadline reported on the new film, The Social Network Part II, late last month. It will apparently delve into the story of The Facebook Files series of articles from The Wall Street Journal, which reported on harms caused by Meta’s platforms (at the time, the company was called Facebook) based on leaked documents.
Last night, Deadline also said that Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White are also leading picks for roles in the new film. However, like with Strong, “no formal offers have been given to either actor,” according to Deadline’s “insiders.” Deadline said that White will “ideally” play Jeff Horwitz, a former WSJ journalist who wrote many of the articles in The Facebook Files series, while Madison will play Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who was the whistleblower behind the documents.
The first Social Network movie was released in 2010.
2025-08-01 01:20:52
Tesla’s newly launched ride-hailing service in San Francisco isn’t quite ready for the “robotaxi” designation. After launching its robotaxi rides in Austin, Texas, with a “safety monitor” in the passenger seat last month, a video of Tesla’s service in San Francisco shows a vehicle arriving with a human at the wheel, as reported earlier by Business Insider.
California requires companies to obtain three permits to operate a commercial robotaxi service. So far, the state has granted Tesla just one of the permits, allowing it to run a ride-hailing service with humans in the driver’s seat. The Alphabet-owned Waymo is currently the only company with the permits to offer commercial driverless rides in San Francisco.
Even though the service in Texas and California hasn’t yet achieved Musk’s promise of operating with “no one in the car,” Musk told Tesla investors last week that he plans to expand robotaxi service to Florida, Nevada, and Arizona.
2025-08-01 01:14:36
Epic has won again. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will not overturn the unanimous jury verdict from 2023 that Google’s app store and payments system had become illegal monopolies. Today, a three-judge panel affirmed the lower court’s decision in Epic v. Google, according to an full opinion you can read at the bottom of this story — and Google will now appeal again, the company confirms to The Verge. It could be appealed to the Supreme Court next.
Judge M. Margaret McKeown begins her opinion for the panel:
In the world of adrenaline-fueled survival that epitomizes the video game Fortnite, winners are decided in blazes of destruction and glory. By contrast, the outcome of this case—centered on Fortnite’s developer, Epic Games, and the Google Android platform—turns on longstanding principles of trial procedure, antitrust, and injunctive remedies.
“Total victory in the Epic v Google appeal!” tweets Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.
Google will appeal: “This decision will significantly harm user safety, limit choice, and undermine the innovation that has always been central to the Android ecosystem. Our top priority remains protecting our users, developers and partners, and maintaining a secure platform as we continue our appeal,” writes Google global head of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland in a statement shared with The Verge.
But the Google Play Store may not be protected from the consequences of its monopoly while Google appeals — it may need to start cracking open Android for third-party stores the way Judge James Donato ruled in his permanent injunction back in 2024. Last October, Donato pressed pause on all but one specific piece of his ruling while Google appealed, but today, Judge McKeown writes “The stay motion on appeal is denied as moot in light of our decision.”
“The stay is lifted,” Epic spokesperson Cat McCormack confirms to The Verge. And as a result, Epic says it will put its own app store within Google’s app store. “Thanks to the verdict, the Epic Games Store for Android will be coming to the Google Play Store!” Sweeney tweeted.
The consequences of the full permanent injunction would stretch far beyond Epic’s game Fortnite: they would force Google to effectively open up its app store to competition for three whole years. Google would have to distribute other rival app stores within the Google Play store, too, give rivals access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, and it would be banned from a variety of anticompetitive practices including a requirement that apps use Google Play Billing. You can read a summary of the details here.
Epic originally sued both Google and Apple in 2020 over the removal of its hit game Fortnite from both stores, though the case was more complicated than that. Epic intentionally used Fortnite as a wedge to challenge the app store monopolies, and in the case of Apple, it mostly lost.
The appeals court did recognize Epic’s gambit today, writing that “Google removed Fortnite from the Play Store after Epic embedded secret code into the app’s software” that bypassed Google’s payment systems. (Epic has never denied it.)
But Epic v. Google turned out to be a very different case, we saw when attending the trial in person and reading all the receipts. A jury saw secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and game developers. The jury saw internal emails between Google execs that suggested Google was scared of how Epic might convince its fellow game developers to join or create rival app stores, creating unwanted competition for Google. Here are a few thoughts about why Epic won against Google, but not Apple.
Today, the Ninth Circuit rejected the idea that the decision in the Apple case should impact the Google case, at least in terms of the all-important question of market definition, aka “can Google really have a monopoly on Android apps if it’s competing against Apple?”
“The market definition question was neither identical to the issue in this case nor litigated and decided in Apple,” McKeown writes, adding that the “commercial realities are different”:
Apple’s “walled garden” is, as the district court in Apple noted, markedly different from Google’s “open distribution” approach […] Google admits as much, noting that “Android’s open philosophy offers users and developers wider choices” than iOS does, even as that openness “limit[s] Google’s ability to directly protect users from encountering malware and security threats when they download apps.” As a consequence of its business model, Apple does not license iOS to other OEMs in the way that Google licenses Android to Samsung, Motorola, and other smartphone manufacturers.
She also uses McDonalds and Chick-fil-A to make a point that markets can overlap:
McDonald’s might compete against Chick-fil-A in the fast- food market yet not compete against Chick-fil-A in the hamburger fast-food market (and instead compete with Wendy’s, Burger King, Sonic, and In-N-Out Burger. Although Google and Apple compete for mobile-gaming downloads and mobile-gaming in-app transactions, they do not compete in the Android-only app distribution and in-app billing markets.
Those two markets, Android app distribution and in-app billing, are where a jury unanimously decided that Google has a monopoly.
Developing… we’re adding more to this story now, refresh in a few minutes for more.
2025-08-01 00:14:59
Believe it or not, summer break is winding down and it’s almost time to head back to school. It’s sad, I know, but look at the bright side: retailers like Amazon are using the occasion as an excuse to launch yet another sale. We’re not complaining, mainly because the deals encompass a wide range of solid dorm essentials, some of which include a few of our top picks from our back-to-school shopping guide. For example, our favorite laptop — the latest MacBook Air — recently dropped to $799.99 ($200 off), which marks an all-time low price we didn’t even see on Prime Day.
It’s not just big-ticket items like laptops that are on sale, either. We also found deals on other Verge-approved goods, from space-saving coffee makers to help you power through a long day of classes to smart lights that’ll make your dorm feel a little more like home. Below, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite deals, a few of which regular readers might recognize from previous coverage and some of which are new. So, let’s dig in.
2025-07-31 23:56:07
Microsoft’s stock price has risen so much today that it has passed a $4 trillion market valuation for the first time in its 50-year history. The software maker is the second company to be valued at $4 trillion, after Nvidia reached a market cap of over $4 trillion earlier this month.
Microsoft has reached this milestone thanks to better-than-expected earnings, and the company reporting its Azure revenue for the first time. Microsoft revealed last night that its Azure cloud computing business had generated more than $75 billion during its 2025 fiscal year, and the company’s stock price immediately started soaring in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq. Microsoft’s share price is up around 4 percent today, helping it maintain its $4 trillion market valuation.
Microsoft has spent more than a decade building up its Azure cloud business, which is ahead of Google’s in revenue but still second place to Amazon Web Services. Azure now touches every corner of Microsoft’s businesses, including powering its AI projects, its Office software, parts of Windows, Xbox, and more.
Microsoft’s investment in cloud computing has positioned it well to take advantage of the computing needs for the future of AI, too. Earlier this year there were plenty of questions over the $100 billion investment into The Stargate Project, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was quick to defend the company’s own $80 billion spend on cloud and AI data center projects. “All I know is, I’m good for my $80 billion,” said Nadella at the time.
Microsoft CFO Amy Hood revealed yesterday that Microsoft is now planning to spend $30 billion on its AI infrastructure investments in the next quarter. If Microsoft keeps up that level of spending then the company will total $120 billion or more on cloud and AI infrastructure over the next fiscal year.
