Spotify is now available on the Epic Games Store, signaling Epic's ambitions to make its game-focused store into a general app store
Context & Ripple Effects
Epic has been building toward this for years: it opened the PC and Mac games store in late 2018 with Fortnite and Hades, and by 2020 was reportedly courting Spotify itself for a coalition of companies critical of Apple's App Store policies (that outreach). In 2024 it took the store onto mobile, launching on iOS in the EU and worldwide on Android (the EU debut).
Adding Spotify — a music service, not a game — turns those moves into a stated strategy: Epic wants its storefront to be a general app store, not just a Steam rival. The company that spent years fighting app-store gatekeeping is now positioning itself as an alternative gate.
First-order effects
- Spotify gains a distribution channel on desktop and mobile that sits outside Apple's and Google's own storefronts, directly serving the anti-gatekeeping position it explored with Epic back in 2020.
- The Epic Games Store stops being a games-only catalog, changing what the storefront competes against — no longer just other game launchers but general app distribution.
Second-order effects
- Other non-game developers now have a template for listing on Epic's store, pressuring Apple and Google wherever alternative distribution is legally possible — most concretely the EU, where Epic already operates its iOS store.
- Rival storefronts face a choice between staying category-specific or broadening their catalogs, since a general-purpose store can bundle music, games, and apps under one install relationship with the user.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the line between game stores and app stores dissolves, and platform power shifts from whoever controls the OS-level storefront to whoever aggregates apps across platforms — a structural erosion of the default-store model Apple and Google rely on.
- Regulators that forced open mobile distribution, notably in the EU, effectively created the market conditions for third-party general app stores; more jurisdictions adopting similar rules would multiply Epic-style alternatives.
The trend: App distribution is fragmenting away from single OS-level storefronts toward cross-platform third-party stores, with regulatory openings like the EU's setting the pace.