Epic Games v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just ruled that, effective immediately, Apple is no longer allowed to collect fees on purchases made outside apps and blocks the company from restricting how developers can point users to where they can make purchases outside of apps. Apple says it will appeal the order.
The ruling was issued as part of Epic Games’ ongoing legal dispute against Apple, and it’s a major victory for Epic’s arguments. Gonzalez Rogers also says that Apple “willfully” chose not to comply with her previous injunction from her original 2021 ruling. “That [Apple] thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” Gonzalez Rogers says.
The judge also referred the case to the US attorney to review it for possible criminal contempt proceedings.
As part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot:
- Impose “any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app”
- Restrict developers’ style, formatting, or placement of links for purchases outside of an app
- Block or limit the “use of buttons or other calls to action”
- Interfere with consumers’ choice to leave an app with anything beyond “a neutral message apprising users that they are going to a third-party site”
Apple’s senior director of corporate communications, Olivia Dalton, sent a statement to The Verge that reads, “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.”
It, of course affects pricing. If they pay $5 to apple, you pay $5 more. It’s just like Trump’s tariffs. The end user pays. Sure, the market encourages keeping prices down to attract customers, but if everyone pays a toll, you can’t compete below that.
Now the companies can. Just like you don’t care about companies paying each other, companies don’t care where they can cut costs. Making their product cheaper, and therefore more attractive to increase sales is good for them. In this case it just happens to be good for consumers too. They may not pass on that hypothetical $5 but if they pass on $4, we’re still better off. Apple is worse off.
I wonder how long before services are targeted for tariffs in response to Trump. It may be that prices for apps and games go back up immediately.
We’ll see. Given how locked down the Apple ecosystem is, often there’s no real alternative for a given software, so the pricing model is “how much can we charge” rather than anything competitive. There’s simply no incentive for companies to bring the cost down when people buy the software already. So yes, costs will be cut, but the prices will not, all for the line to go up.