Apple “willfully selected to not comply” with a court docket order to loosen its app retailer restrictions—and one among its executives lied underneath oath concerning the firm’s plans, a federal choose wrote on Wednesday.
Decide Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has referred the scenario to the US Lawyer’s Workplace in San Francisco “to research whether or not prison contempt proceedings are applicable.”
In 2021, Gonzalez Rogers presided over a lawsuit introduced by Fortnite developer Epic Video games over the iPhone maker’s allegedly anticompetitive practices that hampered the flexibility of builders to generate income from the App Retailer. This included Apple’s coverage of taking a 30 % fee on sure in-app purchases.
Whereas Gonzalez Rogers finally dominated in favor of Apple on most counts, she ordered the corporate to start permitting builders to market methods to make in-app purchases exterior of the App Retailer ecosystem. Apple responded by decreasing its fee to 27 % on purchases made elsewhere, nevertheless it additionally launched a sequence of different adjustments, together with exhibiting so-called scare screens, to dissuade customers from making purchases exterior its ecosystem.
Final 12 months, Epic challenged in court docket how Apple was responding to the order, main Gonzalez Rogers to require the tech large to show over paperwork that contributed to Wednesday’s contempt ruling.
Apple pursued its noncompliance technique “with the categorical intent to create new anticompetitive boundaries which might, by design and in impact, preserve a valued income stream; a income stream beforehand discovered to be anticompetitive,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in her ruling on Wednesday. “That it thought this court docket would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation.”
She additionally stated that Apple executives tried to cover the true motivations for the adjustments. “In stark distinction to Apple’s preliminary in-court testimony, contemporaneous enterprise paperwork reveal that Apple knew precisely what it was doing and at each flip selected essentially the most antiaggressive possibility,” Gonzalez Rogers stated. She went so far as accusing Alex Roman, a vice chairman of finance at Apple, of mendacity throughout testimony through which he talked about how Apple got here to its determination to go along with a 27 % fee on purchases made exterior the App Retailer. “The testimony of Mr. Roman was replete with misdirection and outright lies,” the choose stated.
“We strongly disagree with the choice,” Apple spokesperson Olivia Dalton stated in a press release to WIRED. “We’ll adjust to the court docket’s order and we are going to enchantment.” Roman didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Citing inner Apple paperwork from 2023, Gonzalez Rogers stated Apple’s App Retailer chief Phillip Schiller “had advocated that Apple adjust to the injunction” however that CEO Tim Cook dinner “ignored Schiller and as a substitute allowed Chief Monetary Officer Luca Maestri and his finance staff to persuade him in any other case.”
The choose demanded that Apple instantly comply together with her earlier order. “That is an injunction, not a negotiation,” she wrote. “There aren’t any do-overs as soon as a celebration willfully disregards a court docket order. Time is of the essence. The Courtroom won’t tolerate additional delays. As beforehand ordered, Apple won’t impede competitors.”
Epic Video games CEO Tim Sweeney posted on X that the brand new ruling would convey an finish to “Apple’s 15-30% junk charges.”
Replace 4/30/25 10:00 ET: This story has been up to date with a press release from Apple.
