The Judge is none too pleased with Apple.
You might remember that Epic has been in a long legal battle against Apple. You may have even thought this battle was over. You would be wrong, however.
Regardless, in a Zoom call with press on Wednesday, Tim Sweeney said that Epic is “going to do everything we can to bring Fortnite back to the iOS App Store next week.” This came right after a judge found that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction meant to allow iOS developers to pull customers to third-party payment processors for in-app purchases.
That injunction spent three years going through appeals until the Supreme Court declined to hear their final appeal on the matter. The District Court of Northern California has since been engaged in a series of evidentiary hearings examining Apple’s “compliance plan” for that injunction. Which has led to District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Wednesday night order, where she put the company on full blast for, you know, not following the injunction she placed on them.
Apple’s response to the Injunction strains credulity. After two sets of evidentiary hearings,
the truth emerged. Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the Injunction’s goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up (the 2024 evidentiary hearing). To unveil Apple’s actual decision-making process, not the one tailor-made for litigation, the Court ordered production of real-time documents and ultimately held a second set of hearings in 2025.
The order continues, and if you didn’t think she was pissed at them before, she definitely is now. And pissing off a judge tends not to go very well.
To summarize: One, after trial, the Court found that Apple’s 30 percent commission
“allowed it to reap supracompetitive operating margins” and was not tied to the value of its
intellectual property, and thus, was anticompetitive. Apple’s response: charge a 27 percent
commission (again tied to nothing) on off-app purchases, where it had previously charged nothing, and extend the commission for a period of seven days after the consumer linked-out of the app. Apple’s goal: maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. Two, the Court had prohibited Apple from denying developers the ability to communicate with, and direct consumers to, other purchasing mechanisms. Apple’s response: impose new barriers and new requirements to increase friction and increase breakage rates with full page “scare” screens, static URLs, and generic statements. Apple’s goal: to dissuade customer usage of alternative purchase opportunities and maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream. In the end, Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction.
Which is absolutely true. Apple thought they could run this bizarre workaround that surface-level honored the letter of the injunction while not actually doing so, either literally or in spirit, and assumed that the court would not be upset with them. The order continues, noting how Apples testimony in the initial court hearings stood in “stark contrast” to the evidence that later came to the court.
In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business
documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most
anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied
under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but
Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his
finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.
Judge Rogers finished the overview with the following:
This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully
disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As
previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from
implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective
immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases.
Apple made the following statement to Ars Technica in regard to the situation:
We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.
Back to Fortnite, however. Epic plans to submit a new version of the game to the iOS App Store within the coming week. And it will be much like the version they had back in mid-2020 which kicked this entire legal affair off. It will have Apple’s payment options, as well as their own “Epic Direct Payment” system, which offers a cheaper means of purchasing in-game currency and items.
Tim Sweeney was a happy guy in that Zoom call on Wednesday, though. He believes the court order was a “huge victory for developers” that want to engage their own in-app payment plans on iOS.
This is what we’ve wanted all along. We think that this achieves the goal that we’ve been aiming for in the US, while there are still some challenges elsewhere in the world.
Tim Sweeney
Sweeney acknowledged that the original Fortnite developer account is still banned by Apple. That said, they have several other developer accounts that are not banned, notably the one used to support Unreal Engine on Apple devices. And while Sweeney admits Apple can still “arbitrarily reject Epic from the App Store despite Epic following all the rules,” he noted that, after this recent court ruling, Apple would then “have to deal with various consequences of that if they did.”
Source: Ars Technica
About Author
