Xbox has announced that come November, you'll be able to buy and play Xbox games directly within the Android app thanks to a recent court ruling against Android owner Google.
In a message on X (formerly Twitter), Xbox president Sarah Bond says that a recent court decision ruling that Google must open up its Play Store to third-party apps will "allow more choice and flexibility".
The ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by Epic against Google, with the former alleging that the latter's dominance of the mobile sphere (alongside that of Apple, against whom Epic also brought a lawsuit) constitutes an illegal monopoly, a position with which the court clearly agreed.
Bond says the decision to incorporate purchases directly into the Xbox Android app is born of Xbox's mission to "allow more players to play on more devices".
Right now, there's no news on whether or not this will be possible on the Apple App Store version of the app; Bond only mentions Android, and since Apple wasn't ordered by courts to open up its App Store to third-party storefronts, the iOS situation is unlikely to change anytime soon.
The Epic-Google situation began back in 2020, when Epic decided to allow players to purchase Fortnite's V-Bucks currency on mobile using a proprietary payment method instead of going through Apple and Google's respective payment processes.
This prompted both Google and Apple to remove the game from their mobile storefronts, a decision over which Epic quickly sued both companies, hoping to prove that Google and Apple's mobile dominance constituted a duopoly.
In 2020, close to when Epic first filed both of its lawsuits, Microsoft filed a statement in favor of the Fortnite developer, although said statement was in support of an injunction adjacent to the case rather than the main lawsuit itself.
It looks like Epic has arguably repaid Microsoft in kind for that support today, whether it intended to or not. You'll be able to buy and play Xbox games directly through the Xbox Android app starting in November this year, although we don't have a concrete date for that change yet.
