In September 2021, U.S. judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a judgement in Epic Games’ case against Apple. She mostly sided with Apple but, critically, ruled third-party developers must be permitted to link to external purchasing mechanisms from within their apps.
Even that barest of changes, however, has apparently been too onerous for Apple to comply with in the spirit the court intended. Instead of collecting a typical 30% commission on in-app purchases, Apple said it would take 27% of external purchases made within seven days of someone using an in-app link. This sucks. The various rules Apple implemented, including the different commission rate, have been a problem ever since. In a ruling today, Gonzalez Rogers finds Apple’s measures do not comply with the court’s expectations.
Kif Leswing, CNBC:
Apple willfully violated a 2021 injunction that came out of the Epic Games case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a court filing on Wednesday.
[…]
Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both [Apple executive Alex] Roman and Apple.
The judge’s order (PDF) is full of withering remarks and findings, like this footnote on the sixth page (citation removed):
Apple’s “entitlement” perspective and mantra persisted beyond the Injunction. For example, Apple’s Communications Director, Marni Goldberg, texted her colleague during the first evidentiary hearings, that “It’s Our F***ING STORE.” Not surprisingly (nor convincingly), she did not “recall” sending those messages.
There are several points like these where the judge makes clear she does not appreciate Apple’s obstinate approach. But the business-related findings are notable, too. For example, this passage on pages 17–18 (citations removed for clarity):
Further, in May 2023, Apple through Oliver and others received feedback from Bumble, a large, well-known developer on Apple’s and Google’s alternative billing programs. Bumble specifically advised Apple that “[p]ayment processing fees average out significantly higher than the 4% fee reduction currently offered by Google in the [user choice billing] program or [the] 3% fee in Apple’s … solution resulting in negative margin for developers.” In other words, Bumble explained to Apple that a “3% discount” was not economically viable for a developer because the external cost of payments exceeds 3%. Apple’s own internal assessment from February 2023 reflects data meriting the same conclusion — that the external costs of payments for developers on link-out purchases would exceed Apple’s 3% discount if it demanded a 27% rate.
The evidence uncovered in the 2025 hearing demonstrated Apple’s knowledge and expectation that the restrictions would effectively dissuade any real developer participation, to Apple’s economic advantage.
To all those who have said Apple’s regulatory and legal responses have amounted to malicious compliance, you appear to be correct. Stripping more formal language, as the judge has done here, reveals how fed up she is with Apple’s petulant misconduct.
Throughout this filing, Phil Schiller comes across very well, unlike fellow executives Luca Maestri, the aforementioned Alex Roman, and Tim Cook. In internal discussions, he consistently sounds like the most reasonable voice in the room — though Gonzalez Rogers still has stern words for him throughout. (For example, Schiller claimed external purchasing links alongside in-app options would make users more susceptible to fraud, even though under Apple’s rules it must review and approve those links. The judge writes “[n]o real-time business documents credit that view”.)
Gonzalez Rogers also has critical words about Apple’s current visual interface design patterns. In a section on page 32 featuring screenshots of possible button styles permissible for developers to provide external links, she writes of a “plain link or button style” not dissimilar to many post-iOS 7-style “buttons”:
Nothing about either example appears to be a “button,” by the ordinary usage and understanding of the word. There is, certainly, an external-link icon next to the call to action and hyperlink, but Apple strains to call either of these strings of text a “button.”
Yet, of a subsequent screenshot featuring one button of this style and another with a rounded rectangle background:
The lower example is readily identifiable as a button.
A final set of passages I would like to point to in this filing is the suspicion of Apple’s intellectual property justification for charging such onerous fees in the first place. Quite a bit of this is repeated from other judgements and filings in this case, but it is quite something to read them all together. For example, in a footnote on page 60 (citations removed for clarity):
[…] Apple also argues that the question of whether Apple’s commission appropriately reflects the value of its intellectual property is not an issue for injunction compliance, and that it is legitimate for a business to promote the value of its corporation for stockholders. Apple misses the point. The issue is that Apple flouted the Court’s order by designing a top-down anticompetitive system, in which its commission played a fundamental role.
For the same reasons, the Court disagrees that requiring Apple to set a commission of zero constitutes and unconstitutional taking. For instance, as described infra Section IV, in the trademark context, “a party who has once infringed is allowed less leniency for purposes of injunction enforcement than an innocent party.” Apple does not have an absolute right to the intellectual property that it wields as a shield to competition without adequate justification of its value. Apple was provided with an opportunity to value that intellectual property and chose not to do so.
On page 21, the judge cites an internal email on the topic:
[T]he team has discussed variations on the commission options with lower rates, but we struggled to land on ironclad pricing rationales that would (1) stand up to scrutinizing comparisons with defenses of the commission and existing discounting approaches in other jurisdictions and (2) that we could substantiate solidly on a bottoms up basis without implicitly devaluing our IP / proprietary technology.
The justification for Apple’s commission is entirely fictional. The company is not expected to, in its words, “give away [its] technology for free”, but it is clearly charging commissions like these simply because it can. It owns the platform and it believes it is entitled to run it in any way it chooses. At Apple’s scale, however, that argument does not fly.
Legal bodies around the world are requiring similar changes, and Apple’s reluctance to rip off the bandage and adopt a single global policy seems increasingly stupid. The longer it drags this stuff out, the worse it looks.
I am sure there are smart people at Apple who believe they are morally and legally correct to keep fighting. But Gonzalez Rogers accused an executive of lying under oath, seems to find the rest of the company’s executive team legally contemptible, and finds the behaviour of the world’s most valuable company to be pretty outrageous. All of this because, according to the company’s internal records on page 42, it might “lose over a billion [dollars] in revenue” if 25% of users chose to use external purchase links and the company collected no commission on them.