Google has appealed to the EU's General Court in Luxembourg against two European Commission decisions issued on 16 July this year: one opens up core Android features to rival AI assistants, the other forces Google to share anonymized search data with competitors. Google filed the appeal on 29 September, asking the court to throw out both orders and arguing they put users' privacy at risk.
Both decisions come under the EU's Digital Markets Act, which since 2023 has forced the biggest online platforms to open parts of their services to smaller rivals. The first order requires Google to give other assistants the same access to Android that only its own assistant, Gemini, has now. Under the second, from January 2027 Google must give rival search engines and chatbots with built-in search access to anonymized data on what users type and click.
Android's eleven features
The Commission lists eleven phone features that only Gemini can access by default right now: the microphone and camera, what's on screen, the wake-word command that activates the assistant by voice (such as "Hey Google"), the ability to tap the screen and open other apps on a user's behalf, access to system settings, notifications and screenshots, running in the background, and the right to run an AI model directly on the phone without sending data to a server. In practice, this means a user could ask a rival assistant, instead of Gemini, to book a taxi, suggest a reply to a message or find a nearby address — things only Google's assistant can do across the whole system right now.
For this to work, the wake-word command has to stay active even when the screen is locked, since it runs on a separate chip that saves battery. All eleven features must work in Android 18 by 1 August 2027 at the latest, while the ability for several assistants to "listen" for their wake word at the same time comes a year later, with Android 19, by 1 August 2028. Before that, Google must publish the access terms by 1 February 2027, and rivals can apply from 1 May that year.
Anonymized data in batches of at least 1,000 users
The second decision concerns the search engine itself. Google must hand over data on what people search for, what they click on and how results are ranked, on terms that are the same and fair for everyone. Anonymizing the data works in three steps: direct identifiers are stripped out, rare or sensitive searches are deleted, and what's left is grouped into batches of at least 1,000 people, so no one can be identified. Only companies with at least 50,000 monthly users in the EU will get access, under closed data handling and an independent audit every year.
"People use search for their most personal questions, from health concerns to relationships with those close to them, and forcing us to share these queries without proper safeguards will do irreversible harm to their privacy," said Oliver Bethell, Google's senior director for competition. Google also says Android is already open to other services, that the data-sharing rules lack proper safeguards and don't ask users for consent, and that the orders threaten Android's security.
The Commission says it will defend its decisions in court and that it weighed carefully the integrity and security of the affected features, along with data protection, when drawing them up. It says the method for anonymizing search data was developed with outside and in-house privacy experts, and that the goal of both decisions is to level the playing field for smaller companies. In July, the Commission also fined Google 890 million euros for favoring its own services, in a separate case under the same law.
Android runs on three out of every four phones in Bulgaria, with the rest on iOS, while across the EU Google's share of mobile operating systems is around 60%. Since late September this year, Gemini has been the only built-in voice assistant on phones, tablets, Wear OS watches and Android Auto, after Google dropped the old Google Assistant from Android. The Commission wants rivals such as ChatGPT and Perplexity to get the same system access Gemini already has everywhere.
The case now sits with the General Court in Luxembourg, the EU's second-highest court, with no date set for a ruling. The deadlines in the Commission's decisions keep running regardless of the appeal.