The legal battle between Apple and Epic Games is still ongoing and doesn’t seem to end anytime soon as such we are seeing many new witnesses pop up at every trial session of the hearing. Recently, Epic Games expert witness testified that information from Apple’s Corporate Financial Planning and Analysis group show the App Store had a 77.8% operating margin in 2019, and 74.9% in 2018.
Barnes state that Apple has been tracking its App Store profits for several years now, he testified, and “also refute criticisms of my report proffered by certain Apple expert witnesses that it is not possible to calculate reliably or usefully the operating margins of the App Store.”
However, according to Apple, it doesn’t have a separate profit and loss statement for its App Store. a company’s spokesperson stated that “Epic’s expert’s calculations of the operating margins for the App Store are simply wrong and we look forward to refuting them in court.”
The main centre issue between the lawsuit of Epic games is that the game developer argues that the App Store provides no real service, but simply serves as a way for Apple to extract money from developers. It is suing Apple for antitrust violations on those grounds, after launching an unauthorized in-app payments system for Fortnite earlier this year. But Apple insists the App Store review process is a pivotal part of the broader platform safety efforts around iOS.
“Mr. Barnes’ estimate of the App Store’s operating margin is unreliable because it looks in isolation at one segment of the iOS ecosystem in a way that artificially boosts the apparent operating margin of that segment. When one looks at Apple’s device and services ecosystem as a whole, the operating margin falls to an unremarkable level.”
