Apple filed an emergency motion to stay in its case against Epic Games, asking to be allowed to continue charging commissions on in-app transactions that link out for payment. The iPhone maker said the new linking policies would cost “hundreds of millions to billions of dollars” annually.
Apple Inc. requested a court to pause an order that required the company’s App Store developers to redirect users to the web to purchase in-app items without paying a commission, reducing a “lucrative source of revenue.”
However, Epic Games stated that the motion to stay was a last-ditch effort to block competition and extract massive junk fees at the expense of consumers and developers.
Apple seeks to pause a court order affecting its U.S. App Store business
In a filing late Wednesday with the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, Apple sought to pause the part of last week’s ruling that blocked it from charging commissions on transactions linked outside the App Store.
The court decision also blocked the tech company from controlling the language and app design that developers used to steer their customers to their own websites to make payments. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered Apple to change the way it operated its App Store in a sweeping ruling from an antitrust case filed by Epic Games.
Sen. Warren said Apple defied a court order “so that it could steal from app developers and jack up prices for users.”
She added that a federal judge called it an “obvious cover-up and put a stop to it, which was a huge win for app users, developers, and competition. However, the iPhone maker contended that it had complied with the 2021 order. It also stressed that the federal judge’s ruling caused the company ‘grave irreparable harm’.”
“These restrictions, which will cost Apple substantial sums annually, are based on conduct that has never been adjudicated to be (and is not) unlawful…Rather, they were imposed to punish Apple for purported non-compliance with an earlier state-law injunction that is itself invalid.”
The tech giant previously responded to the original court order by allowing developers to bypass its in-app payment tool and point users to the web to complete transactions for in-app purchases. However, the company required developers to pay a 27% cut of whatever revenue they generated.
Gonzales Rogers says Apple willfully chose to violate 2021 order
Last month, Judge Rogers in Oakland found that Apple had violated her original court order from the trial decided in 2021 that forced Apple to make limited changes to its linking out policy under California law. The federal judge said the company “willfully” violated her 2021 order and referred it to federal prosecutors for a possible criminal probe of contempt of court.
Judge Rogers’ new ruling was more expansive, ordering Apple to immediately stop imposing its commissions on purchases made for iPhone apps through web links inside its apps, among other changes.
The company is now looking to get a stay on that order and another one from the case that prevents it from restricting app developers from choosing the language or placement of those links until the entire decision can be appealed. It also said that the required changes in their current form would cost it substantial sums.
According to the tech giant, this is the latest chapter in Epic’s largely unsuccessful effort to use competition law to change how Apple runs the App Store. Its emergency motion for a stay cited a previous order in the case that found that new linking policies would cost Apple hundreds of millions to billions of dollars annually.
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