On Wednesday, Epic Games submitted a cert petition to the Supreme Court, starting the process for the court to reconsider whether Apple’s software division violates federal antitrust rules. In the upcoming months, we’ll see if the Supreme Court will take on the case, which would revive a drawn-out legal dispute between the two businesses that has been making its way through the courts for nearly five years. Apple will probably submit a petition shortly as well, objecting to an earlier decision that was only partially sympathetic to Epic’s arguments.
In 2020, Epic Games, the company that creates Fortnite and manages the Epic Games Store, filed a lawsuit against Apple.
After Apple removed Fortnite from iOS, that case was filed. Epic started the debate by willfully breaking App Store guidelines by allowing players to purchase in-game currency directly.
That solution got past Apple’s contentious fees, breaking the rules of the tech giant in the process, and it also served as the impetus for Epic’s active push to mobilize developers against Apple’s ongoing software practices.
In a legal battle with Epic Games earlier this year over similar accusations over the company’s App Store standards, Apple generally prevailed. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sustained the majority of a previous ruling made by a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in an order released in April. The majority of Epic’s claims that Apple is breaking federal antitrust rules by blocking alternative software markets on iOS were rejected by that verdict.
The federal judge did find that Apple violated California’s Unfair Competition Law by forbidding developers from informing customers about alternate payment alternatives, giving Epic Games a slim chance of success even if the courts largely sided with Apple. That judgment was upheld by the appeals court earlier this year.
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