Posted by nobody9999 12/12/2025
Before this ruling:
1. Apple were prohibited from charging any fee for external/referral purchases. Now this is once again allowed and the district court will work with all parties to develop a reasonable commission.
2. External links were permitted to dominate over IAP options. Now they must have equal size, prominence and quantity.
3. Apple were prevented from showing any kind of exit screen, that is now restored (but it can't be a scare screen).
4. Apple were barred from preventing certain developers/app classes from using external links (such as those enrolled in the News or Video Partner Programs) those are now reversed and Apple can once again prevent them.
Epic/Tim Sweeney are trying to spin these recent losses as a win. It's the old marketing playbook of hoping no one reads the fine print.
The celebration is premature but it's a good step forward legally. I think only #4 is a true loss here
> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review.
Wow, one step forward, and one step back. Good job, Epic.
The outcome is obviously going to be that Apple's store will have the most apps, with the most up to date versions, and with the most free apps/games. I'm sure Fortnite will do just fine though.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this, why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors?
Yeah, this is the fundamental problem, and not something this court ruling does anything to fix. Apple has full control over what software its competitors are allowed to sell. The court's solution? Tell Apple to be more fair when dictating rules to its competitors. Yeah... I'm sure that'll work great.
As a pattern there's nothing wrong with it.
The crux of the issue is that creation of a mobile operating system that people actually want, like in some other industries, as resulted in two dominant platforms that don't compete all that much with each other. That's a much more interesting and important "problem" to solve than Apple/Google create competing apps on their software distribution platforms.
There's Linux phones and phones that run versions of Android that are completely decoupled from Google.
I'll keep pounding it in people's heads that 30 years ago Microsoft was hit over a web browser. It's a shame these days people would instead revert that and say "just download Netscape". If that worked, sure. But we have decades of market lock in showing it doesn't
Today there are many phones to choose from. You can buy an iPhone, or a Pixel, or a Galaxy. You can even buy a more open-source style phone with open-source style stores just like any other generic product feature. There is a marketplace and there is competition, it's just that, unlike what so many people here seem to desire, locked-down stores are what the market prefers.
I don't think phones and PCs compete against each other, though. A phone can act like a general computer, but a PC can't act like a phone.
>Today there are many phones to choose from.
We had Linux, mac, BSD and a few other OS's back in the day as well. If we're saying Windows is 95% of PCs back then, I don't think it's controversial saying Apple and Android are 95% of phones. Especially in a day and age where phones are now needed to act as verification for work and school and chat communications are expected to be snappy (so it's not like I can just opt out and go back to dumb phones).
>locked-down stores are what the market prefers.
That's why anti-trust isn't left to "what the market prefers".
Yes, society will always waiver towards idyllic destruction if left ubchecked. People generally "like" monopolies. People yearn for that society on WALL-E where they do minimum work and get maximum dopamine. It's a quirk genes that benefitted us 1000 years ago that haven't adjusted to modern realities.
Governments and non-monopoly businesses alike hate it, though. Don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Don't want to have a single businessman hold the country hostage later and shift to a plutocracy as they abuse your citizens who work.
That's why it's best to stop it much earlier and not when the company becomes a trillionaire. But now is the 2nd best time.
MS had 97% market share and were abusing their market dominance to push others out. Apple isn't doing this, so there isn't a valid comparison here.
Duopoly might apply if those companies were using their combined dominance to collude and push other competitors out but that isn't really happening as evidenced by the amount of competitors that are in the market.
You're doing the equivalent of saying "but Dell and HP make PC's". When the case is about Internet explorer.
> Do you really need a nanny state
This is a false dichotomy. The reason you're doing this is because you know the current situation sucks major donkey dick and nobody, including you, likes it. So to defend it you have to appeal to something even more sucky. It's the death rattle of a poorly constructed argument.
You don't need a nanny state, quite the opposite! You need a freer market.
When Walmart sells the evil fridge, which I can only assume has been hexed by a swamp witch, what they are actually doing is subverting the free market. They're cheating.
Instead of competing by selling the best groceries or the best fridge, they're competing by artificially limiting their competition. They see the market, say "fuck that market, your market is only our stuff", and force your hand. They've created a soft monopoly.
The misconception about free markets is that, if you just let them be, then they're good. Ha. Every free market player is actively devising every single plan imaginable to make the market less free.
If Walmart could run behind you and lock the doors so that you have to buy their groceries, lest you starve to death, they would. Luckily, the "nanny state" stepped in, and we have a freer market because of it.
This whole argument is a neat trick, as you smuggle bad outcomes into a situation where there aren't any by pretending that everyone wants to buy the horrible product.
If you want to make a case that monopolies that arise from consumers overwhelmingly choosing a preferential product are bad, go ahead, but don't construct an impossible scenario where everyone loses their minds and buys a product that provides purely negative value to them just cuz.
A pre-requisite for a free market is consumer choice, which deception naturally undermines. And don't even say "well the EULA..." no, doesn't count.
Look, you're describing how it should work, and I agree. But how it actually works is far, far different.
No, first the product is introduced with no ads. You sign a EULA that might contain language around ads, but guess what - the EULA is 100 pages long and nobody is reading that shit because we have jobs and families.
The product gets glowing reviews, probably because it's cheap and subsidized by the mega-corp (aka sell product at a loss for market capture). Then, the product enshittifies from under your feet.
There's nothing you can do at that point, because you already bought it. Your "market", so to speak, is 1. You were deceived. You thought you were buying a fridge, but really you were just licensing access to a fridge.
But say you didn't buy it. Even then, you're fucked. There's no trustworthy online reviews, well, anywhere basically. And it's just not reasonable to expect consumers to do hours of research prior to buying anything. No, I should be able to go to the store and ascertain the quality and nature of the product. But I can't, so I get tricked and hoodwinked.
This is all very purposeful. Companies know if they're honest about their products that consumers might look at the competition. So everyone just scams and lies. Even multi-billion dollar multi-nationals are basically running scams at this point. And guess what? All their competition is doing it, too. Because if your competitor is scamming, you have no choice but to be a con artist yourself, lest you become irrelevant.
So market forces do still work on Apple, just not as efficiently as they otherwise would in the absence of these artificial barriers to competition.
Software is somewhat unique in its ability to act against the interests of the person who owns it. Trying to design a fridge to not refrigerate your competitor's food would be impractical and probably easy for consumers to bypass. But designing an operating system which won't run your competitor's software? Trivial, and very hard to bypass. Because of this, companies that write software include anti-consumer features like that all the time to the point where it's almost expected now.
You've been repeating this flawed comparison for years. It's getting really stale.
The App Store is markedly unlike Wal-Mart or Kroger, in that a user cannot buy one thing from one store and another thing from the other. This would be like buying a Kroger-branded car and then being forbidden from entering the Wal-Mart parking lot. The problem with the App Store is not Apple's control over it and the Apple-branded experience - it is the exclusion of alternative and competing schemes that could naturally drive down their own prices.
If Wal-Mart or Kroger did this, they would be in the same hot water as Apple. Probably quite a bit worse, since people understand the commoditization of groceries better than software.
> That's a much more interesting and important "problem" to solve
No it's not. The industry has no interest in overturning it, if there was commercial demand for an innovative third platform then we'd see one. The crux of this issue is Apple becoming a services company and then denying competing services from competing on equal grounds. It cannot get any clearer than that.
Well I've been repeating it because it's still true.
> The App Store is markedly unlike Wal-Mart or Kroger, in that a user cannot buy one thing from one store and another thing from the other.
You're just shifting around a definition of store to fit your argument. If you want to be consistent, it's more like you can't go in to Kroger and demand to buy products sold at Wal-Mart for Wal-Mart prices. You're in a different store.
> No it's not. The industry has no interest in overturning it, if there was commercial demand for an innovative third platform then we'd see one.
So the market is clearly saying "this works and we like it". It's just that the lawyers and accountants want to shift which giant corporation gets to keep more of whatever fee percentage.
> The crux of this issue is Apple becoming a services company and then denying competing services from competing on equal grounds. It cannot get any clearer than that.
Equality will never exist on these platforms, nor is equality necessarily something that's desired. Every company on earth that operates any sort of marketplace or store sets rules and boundaries that restrict competition. You're just mad about Apple/Google doing it because some algorithm decided it was an important issue for you. Do you know why that's true? Because you're sitting here arguing about Apple/Google doing it and not every other company doing it.
Even worse is that these changes that you champion have resulted in no price reductions, no "innovation", and have degraded features that I personally like and enjoy.
You don't have to. Kroger and Wal-Mart are completely commoditized options providing the same service. There is fundamentally no difference from buying at one store vs the other; you can do both. If someone goes into Kroger demanding to buy Wal-Mart products at Wal-Mart prices, they're in luck; Wal-Mart exists. There is no lock-in to either store or the options they provide. You're describing a boogeyman that doesn't exist because the greater grocery market is functional and competitive.
The same opportunity does not exist for customers of the App Store. Apps themselves are entirely commoditized; it's only the App Store that is a deliberate monopoly. That has been consistent since the launch of the iPhone and packaging of iOS applications as infinitely reproducible .IPA files.
> So the market is clearly saying "this works and we like it".
That's how most monopolies work, yes. Unfortunately, "the market" won't be asked to testify to whether or not they like or enjoy a monopoly, but whether it causes anti-competitive damages.
> You're just mad about Apple/Google doing it because some algorithm decided it was an important issue for you.
I cannot parse what you're even trying to accuse me of in this sentence. This is the Y Combinator forum. We discuss monopolies like AdSense and the App Store because they harm the economy, not because Instagram Reels showed me a Louis Rossman short.
Sure you can use your own payment processor, we're still charging 27% though. Sure you can have your own App Store, you still have to go through the same review process though. It seems some of the cracks in this malicious compliance are starting to show.
It is not fair to me as a merchant that everyone who wants to buy a phone case goes to Best Buy. That's where all the foot traffic is. It's clearly anti-competitive that they expect me to pay for shelf space I benefit from.
And now they want to charge me to verify that the USB-C cables I'm selling actually work? How is that remotely reasonable? Just because most of my cables are faulty and customers will inevitably go complain to their customer service desk, why should I bear that cost?
Consumers deserve the right to choose accessories from multiple independent merchants inside Best Buy. Suggesting otherwise is anti-consumer, anti-choice, and proof that you hate open and accessible ecosystems.
Your analogy as presented was so lacking in merit you might as well have been talking about cats and leprechauns for how completely nonsensical it was to bring it up in the context of Apple.
Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better. They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems. Advertising, carrier validation, third party hardware ecosystem, etc.
Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple.
This is factually incorrect, and not only incorrect, but so wildly far from being correct that one wonders if this statement was made in bad faith. They only have around 300 million sqft out of an estimated 12 billion sqft, around 2.5%. That is not an overwhelming percentage, nor is it "99.9999% of all retail square footage in the world", which was not a hyperbolic statement. Competitors in retail can obtain their own shelf space. You cannot obtain your own shelf space for mobile software. The network effects of hardware+OS centralization are too strong, so there are and never will be any viable competitors to iOS and Android.
> Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better.
The R&D expenses do not change regardless of whether there are 1 million or 10 million apps available for iOS. Allowing people to distribute their own software comes at no cost to Apple.
> They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems.
Apple absolutely does not do any of this as it pertains to individual apps.
> Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple
Nobody is asking for Apple's support; really, what the world needs is less of Apple's involvement in the hardware the people own, not more. Epic is clearly willing to spend money on building platforms, since it has a documented $600 million in losses in its effort to build a competitor to Steam. This, however, is not a case where it is possible to build a platform.
You absolutely can sell your product as a merchant! Best buy doesnt force you to pay them a fee, if you are selling electronics. You are perfectly within your right to ship the electronics to the merchant yourself and best buy doesnt take a dime!
The same is not true for Apple. For Apple, a customer can want to make a direct agreement with an app store developer, without the involvement of Apple in any way, on the phone that they completely own, and Apple wasn't allowing this to happen.
It would be like if it was illegal to setup competing stores that are located next to best buy that dont involve best buy in any way. That would be absurd.
But yes, that's built into the product's price. Devs are paying for a license to work with IOS and need to own hardware only Apple sells to work on IOS. So I think those costs are covered.
We'll see what the "reasonable" price is. If nothing else, we know 27% was too much even for appeals.
Not if the only way to get to the store was through that road. In that case, there are public access laws and it is literally illegal for people who "own" a road to charge people money, if there is an easement.
Thats probably a simplification, but they are called "easement by necessity." rights. So even in your example of the roadway, thats also wrong. They get zero dollars.
My point is in the real world sharing an area with it would mean the other store also contributes tax wise. It's not equivalent to bring up real life if the real life paying part isn't also adhered to; the lack of symmetry is notable. I don't think they deserve to set their price, though (30% is way too high).
No, land parcel A does not pay land parcel B any amount of dollars at all.
The fact that the government gets tax revenue says nothing about the fact that land parcel B receives nothing, even if they are require to open their street to the public for easement.
it is not efficient, it doesn't incentivize high quality products, and the web proves that security / safety can be done in an open way.
A) the web is full of phishing and other scams, as well as tons of low quality garbage
B) the web achieves this security model by limiting applications to a browser sandbox, which imposes restrictions on what the software can do. This is a non starter for many native apps.
Its still worth pursuing. Hut the effects may not be what we desire.
Epic celebrates “the end of the Apple Tax” after appeals court win in iOS payments case
Look at the major companies aligned with Epic on this, like Match.com, and what they do.
Games seems to be more of an exception to the rule, for historical reasons.
If Jobs was still here, he would have fired all the fat management.
shame on you Apple, you are acting like M$!
> “I think this is all pretty simple — iBooks is going to be the only bookstore on iOS devices. We need to hold our heads high. One can read books bought elsewhere, just not buy/rent/subscribe from iOS without paying us, which we acknowledge is prohibitive for many things.”
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348130/apple-documents-...
Microsoft, for all their faults, gave us an actual operating system that people could build and distribute executables on as they saw fit with no restrictions, and they did it despite the fact that they owned almost the entire personal computing space.
Imagine Microsoft had charged everyone who distributed a Windows executable 30%, they'd have made trillions by now. Bill Gates said once that Microsoft has captured maybe 1% of the value that people have created on top of their software because they don't insert themselves between what users do with each other and I do think they actually deserve some props for that
Even on Windows, Microsoft has very similar notarization requirements as Apple. Microsoft requires either an ~400-500$/year EV cert (if you don't want to involve Azure), or more recently a $10/month subscription to Azure, which is almost the same as Apple's $99/year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182546