It's looking like the long-running court battle between Apple and Epic Games has reached its final conclusion. Today, CNBC reports that the US Supreme Court declined to take on a request by Epic to look into a lower court ruling that mostly went in Apple's favor.
Epic first filed a lawsuit against Apple in 2020, claiming that Apple's block of third-party payment systems on its iOS app store was in violation of US antitrust laws. Epic launched its payment system inside its hit game Fortnite, which caused Apple to ban the game from the IOS app store. Fortnite remains banned from iPhone and iPad devices.
Both a lower court ruling in 2021 and an appeals court decision in 2023 went Apple's way, with both stating that the company's app store policies did not violate antitrust rules. Today's decision by the US Supreme Court not to hear this case would seem to end this matter.
However, at the same time, the US Supreme Court also decided not to rule on Apple's appeal of the one section of this case that it lost to Epic. The lower courts agreed with Epic that Apple violated California's unfair competition law. This was because Apple had banned app developers from "steering" consumers away from Apple's payment system to make digital purchases for their apps on other systems
As usual with these kinds of case declines, the US Supreme Court did not offer a comment on why it would not look into the Apple vs Epic Games court fight.
While Epic mostly lost its battle with Apple, they have had much greater success in court with a similar lawsuit against Google. In December 2023, a jury agreed with Epic that the Google Play Store, and its billing service, was indeed an illegal monopoly. Google is appealing that jury decision.
23 Comments - Add comment