Google Takes the EU to Court to Keep Gemini’s Special Access on Android

Google is not going to open Android’s deepest AI hooks to its rivals without a fight. On Tuesday, September 29, the company filed an appeal at the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg against two Digital Markets Act decisions the European Commission handed down in July: one that forces Google to give competing AI assistants Gemini-level access to Android, and another that requires it to share search data with rival search engines.

The filing doesn’t pause the clock on its own. Unless the court steps in, Google still has to start sharing search data in January 2027 and roll out the Android changes within 12 months of the decision.

What the EU actually ordered

The Commission opened two “specification proceedings” against Alphabet on January 27, 2026, using the DMA’s interoperability and data-sharing rules. The outcome, published in July, spells out what Android has to let third-party assistants do. According to the Commission, users must be able to wake their preferred assistant with a voice command, the way “Hey Google” summons Gemini today, and hand tasks off to it inside other apps. The Commission’s own examples are ordinary ones: booking a taxi, getting suggested replies in a chat, or pulling up location-based information.

Reporting from The Next Web adds that the measures cover reading on-screen context and being set as the default system assistant, which are the features that make Gemini feel built in rather than bolted on. In short, Brussels wants ChatGPT, Claude or any other assistant to get “equally effective access” to the plumbing Google currently reserves for itself.

The search half of the order is just as significant. Google must hand anonymized search data to competing search providers so they can improve their results. The Commission says the data has to be stripped of identifying details first, and that Google may vet whether a recipient poses a legitimate security or data protection risk.

Google’s argument: privacy and security

Google is leaning hard on privacy. “We’re appealing decisions that will force us to share people’s private search history without sufficient anonymisation,” Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director for competition, said in a statement reported by Euronews. He added that people regularly bring deeply personal questions to Search, and that sharing that information without proper safeguards could harm them.

On the Android side, the company’s position is that the platform is already open to competing services, and that the Commission wrote prescriptive product requirements rather than responding to a specific violation. Google also argues the changes could weaken device security, a familiar line whenever regulators ask a platform owner to hand system-level permissions to outsiders.

The odds aren’t great. Android Headlines notes that appeals against DMA decisions rarely succeed outright, though a ruling that tightens the privacy safeguards without scrapping the orders is a plausible middle ground. And the relationship is already tense: the Commission fined Google 890 million euros in July for favoring its own services in search results.

The timeline so far

Why U.S. Android owners should care

Nothing in these decisions applies to phones sold in the United States. If you’re in Chicago or Charlotte, Gemini stays the assistant Google builds into Android, and rivals keep working through the regular app-level permissions they have now. You can already change your default digital assistant app in Android’s settings, but a third-party assistant still can’t respond to a hotword the way Gemini can or reach into apps with the same depth.

That’s the part worth watching. Google just finished pushing Google Assistant off Android phones in favor of Gemini, and the assistant layer is quickly becoming the most valuable real estate on the phone. The Commission says roughly 60% of EU users are on Android. If Google ends up building a formal, secure way for ChatGPT or Claude to plug into Android at the system level for that market, the code will exist. Whether Google ever turns it on for everyone else is a business decision, not a technical one.

For now, the court case buys Google time and a chance to narrow the rules. It does not change the direction regulators are pushing: the assistant on your phone should be your choice, not the platform owner’s.

Sources: Euronews, Android Headlines, The Next Web. Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash.