US Supreme Court will not review Apple fight with Epic Games over App Store

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The US Supreme Court will not review a legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games over the App Store, one of a pair of cases the Fortnite maker brought to try to break up what it has alleged were monopoly practices on popular platforms for apps.

The decision by the justices not to hear the appeal will leave intact a lower-court ruling that rejected Epic’s claims that Apple had broken federal antitrust law with policies in its App Store that extracted high costs from developers while giving them few options to push back.

It will also leave in place an injunction issued by the lower court forcing Apple to make tweaks to its App Store terms to allow developers to direct users outside of their apps to make payments, however. The lower court had found the prohibition against doing so violated California law.

The appeal stems from a lawsuit filed by Epic Games against Apple in August 2020, accusing the technology giant of preventing competition in the iOS app ecosystem with rules that prohibit rival stores and payment methods in the App Store.

Epic deliberately bypassed Apple’s in-app payment mechanism for its popular Fortnite game in protest at a 30 per cent fee the company charged on digital purchases. It was then booted from Apple’s store, triggering the legal battle.

Epic initiated a parallel legal fight with Google, which maintained similar policies in its Play Store on Android. In December a federal jury in California found that Google broke antitrust law, with the judge in the case now poised to decide what changes Google must make to its business practices to comply with that verdict.

In its case against Apple, Epic has experienced less success. Epic had said that the iPhone maker operated a monopoly in the iOS ecosystem, controlling the pipeline through which developers reached consumers. It said that the prohibition on alternative billing methods allowed Apple to impose artificially high fees on transactions, and that Apple’s decision not to distribute rival stores on its devices similarly prevented competition that would otherwise have driven prices down.

“The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States,” Epic Games chief executive Tim Sweeney wrote on social media platform X after the Supreme Court’s order on Tuesday. “A sad outcome for all developers.”

However, he added: “As of today, developers can begin exercising their court-established right to tell US customers about better prices on the web. These awful Apple-mandated confusion screens are over and done forever.”

Apple’s App Store has drawn scrutiny from courts and antitrust enforcers around the world.

Landmark EU regulation is set to come into effect in March and will require the company to allow the “sideloading” of apps — meaning they can be downloaded from sources other than the App Store. The US Department of Justice has also been probing the company over possible antitrust violations for years.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.