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

Key points

• The Court of Justice of the European Union on 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 has 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. The case, first reported in detail by BleepingComputer, closes a seven-year fight over how Google used Android to give its own products a head start on billions of phones.

The fine itself is not new. What is new is that Google cannot appeal any further. The money is now owed.

What did Google actually do wrong?

The European Commission — the EU's competition regulator — decided back in 2018 that Google had abused its dominant position in the mobile market. In plain terms, 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, if a phone maker wanted to ship devices with the Google Play Store, that maker also had to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser. No Play Store meant no working Android phone in most people's eyes, so manufacturers had little choice.

Second, Google told manufacturers they could not sell any devices running unofficial versions of Android. These were known as anti-fragmentation agreements, and they blocked rival flavours of Android from getting off the ground.

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, a lower EU court, the General Court, agreed with most of the Commission's findings but knocked out part of the case around revenue-sharing deals. That trimmed the fine to €4.125 billion.

Google appealed again, hoping the top court would overturn the rest. It did not.

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

What Google says

Google disagrees, but is paying.

"Android provides more choice for everyone and supports thousands of businesses," a company spokesperson said. "This judgment fails to recognize our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and 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, not today's. It points to changes it made after the 2018 decision, further user-choice measures added in 2021, and more than 20 tweaks made after the EU's Digital Markets Act — a newer law aimed at reining in the largest tech platforms — took effect in 2024. Those include the 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 will keep working. Your apps will keep updating.

But the ruling matters because it locks in a European rulebook that other regulators, from the UK to South Korea to the United States, are watching closely. It tells big platforms that bundling their own services with a dominant product is a legal risk, not just a business tactic. 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.