Google loses final EU appeal, must pay €4.1 billion Android fine

Key points

• The Court of Justice of the European Union in 2025 dismissed Google's final appeal against a €4.1 billion ($4.7 billion) antitrust fine tied to Android.
• The original 2018 European Commission decision found Google forced phone makers to pre-install Google Search and Chrome to get the Play Store.
• A lower EU court cut the fine from €4.34 billion to €4.125 billion in 2022 but kept the core findings intact.
• Google says it changed its contracts in 2018 and made more than 20 further product changes after the Digital Markets Act took effect in 2024.

Google's run out of road in Europe. The Court of Justice of the European Union, the bloc's highest court, has thrown out Google's final appeal against a €4.1 billion ($4.7 billion) fine, closing a seven-year fight over how Google used Android to give its own products a head start on billions of phones.

What's new isn't the fine. It's that Google can't appeal any further. The money is owed.

What did Google actually do wrong?

The European Commission, the EU's competition regulator, decided in 2018 that Google had abused its dominant position in the mobile market. Regulators said Google used the popularity of Android, the operating system that runs most of the world's smartphones, to squeeze out rivals.

Three practices were flagged as illegal. First, any phone maker that wanted to ship devices with the Google Play Store had to pre-install Google Search and Chrome. No Play Store meant no working Android phone in most people's eyes, so manufacturers had little real choice. Second, Google told manufacturers they couldn't sell devices running unofficial Android versions, a restriction known as anti-fragmentation agreements that blocked rival builds of Android from gaining traction. Third, Google paid some manufacturers and mobile networks to install Google Search exclusively, keeping competing search engines off the home screen.

How the fine shrank, then stuck

The Commission's original penalty was €4.34 billion. In 2022, the General Court agreed with most of the Commission's findings but struck part of the case around revenue-sharing deals, trimming the fine to €4.125 billion.

Google appealed again. It didn't work.

The Court of Justice ruled that the General Court had correctly weighed the anti-competitive effects of Google's contracts and correctly concluded that pre-installation and anti-fragmentation rules restricted competition within the Android ecosystem in Google's favour. The judgment affirms the lower court's decision in full.

What Google says

Google disagrees, but it's paying.

"Android provides more choice for everyone and supports thousands of businesses," a company spokesperson said, in a press release shared with the media. "This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and available for free. In any event, we adapted our agreements to comply with the initial decision back in 2018."

The company argues the ruling reflects an older mobile market. It points to changes made after the 2018 decision, additional user-choice measures added in 2021, and more than 20 tweaks made after the EU's Digital Markets Act, a law aimed at reining in the largest tech platforms, took effect in 2024. Those include choice screens that now ask new Android users which search engine and browser they want.

Google also insists Apple's iPhone is a real competitor and that Android phone makers already compete hard on price and features.

Should ordinary phone users care?

Probably not in any dramatic way. Your phone keeps working, your apps keep updating. But the ruling matters because it locks in a European rulebook that regulators in the UK, South Korea and the United States are watching. It tells big platforms that bundling their own services with a dominant product is a legal risk, not just a business tactic.

This is the kind of structural enforcement our 3 July 2026 Digital Markets Act coverage has tracked from the start: slow-moving cases that land years after the conduct, but reshape defaults for hundreds of millions of users once they do. Expect more choice screens, fewer defaults set in stone, and slightly more room for smaller search engines and browsers to reach you without paying for the privilege.

What to watch: whether the DMA's faster enforcement timeline makes cases like this one obsolete before the next appeal cycle ends.