Xbox Says Its Mobile Store Is Still Alive Despite Delays

404 errors on Xbox’s test pages had fans assuming the company’s mobile store had quietly been shelved. Instead, Xbox says the project is still alive, and new CEO Asha Sharma has kept the push tied to Microsoft’s bigger fight for open mobile competition.

Microsoft first put the idea on the record in an October 2023 regulatory filing tied to the UK Competition and Markets Authority review, describing a “next generation games store” across devices, including mobile. By May 2024, Sarah Bond was giving a sharper timeline, saying the storefront was planned for July 2024, would launch on the web first, and would start with Microsoft-owned titles like Candy Crush and Minecraft before opening to partners later.

That July window never materialized. In November 2024, Bond said Xbox already had the functionality in place to let players buy and play games directly through the Xbox app on Android, but the rollout had been pushed back because of the court fight over Google Play. Google pushed back too, saying Microsoft had always been able to offer Android users that experience through its app and had simply chosen not to.

The timing matters because Microsoft’s mobile strategy has become part of a much larger regulatory battle over how Apple and Google control access to games, payments, and storefronts on phones. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act has been one of the biggest forces pushing for open mobile competition, while the Epic v. Google dispute has also hung over Android plans. For Xbox, the mobile store is no longer just a feature add-on. It is a test case for whether publishers can sell around the usual app-store rules.

That is why the latest message from Xbox matters. The company is still treating the mobile store as an active project, not a dead one, even if it has not set a new launch date. Phil Spencer has previously called it “an important part of our strategy,” and Microsoft’s scale shows why: the company has said it reaches more than 500 million monthly active users and remains one of the biggest publishers across platforms. If Xbox can finally get its own mobile storefront moving, it could change how players buy games outside Apple and Google’s standard storefront rules.