a judge in Northern California, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, issued a very harsh rebuke to Apple over its control of the iPhone app store. The order is part of a long-standing antitrust case brought by Epic Games against Apple in 2020.
In 2021, Epic Games lost on the Federal antitrust charges, but won on a state claim of unfair conduct, specifically over its refusal to let app developers communicate with or give consumers a place outside of the app store to pay for apps. The judge found that Apple’s conduct “allowed it to reap supracompetitive operating margins,” and ordered it to let app developers communicate with customers and buy apps outside the App store. The case went on appeal, with the Ninth Circuit upholding the decision and order. In January of 2024, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, and Gonzalez Rogers’s order went into effect.
Since then, Apple has engaged in bad faith tactics to avoid complying. Today, Gonzalez Rogers sanctioned the company and ordered Apple to allow app developers to sell their apps outside of the App Store without a fee. That’s a huge deal. For some context, the New York Times says that app store fees “makes up a large portion of the nearly $100 billion in annual services revenue that Apple collects.”
Apple has engaged in bad faith, levying a variety of different and new fees to app developers to get around the spirit of the judicial order. It put up scare screens, engaged in sleazy privilege claims, and lied under oath to the judge about its decision-making. Normally these kinds of tactics happen without consequence for important business executives. But this time, the judge accused Apple Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, of having “outright lied under oath,” and referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney for a criminal contempt investigation. She also went out of her way to blame Apple CEO Tim Cook directly.