If you thought the Epic Games vs. Apple saga was over, well, I’ve got some bad news for you.
An Epic spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the company will appeal the court’s ruling. It’s not hard to see why.
The ruling handed down by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers only had one win for Epic, with Apple winning every other count. Although Apple’s one loss — the company is now legally required to let app developers to point to their own payment methods instead of limiting them to Apple’s in-app purchase system only — was significant, it’s also clearly less than Epic hoped for.
Gonzalez Rogers’ ruling determined that Apple won’t be forced to allow users to sideload apps or allow other app stores on iOS, nor will it need to lower its 30 percent App Store fee.
Moreover, the ruling found that Epic was on the hook for several million dollars (not a huge amount at the scale of these companies, but certainly not nothing), and that Apple wasn’t required to reinstate the Epic Games developer account. In other words, Epic can’t bring Fortnite back to the App Store even if it wanted to (and it clearly doesn’t want to).
In short, none of this comes off as a major win for Epic. Meanwhile, Apple is trumpeting the ruling as a victory, and has yet to acknowledge its new legal obligation to let developers point users to their own payment systems. It’s also worth noting that Apple had (sort of) already agreed to let developers point to other payment options, so to an extent, nothing has changed here.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the appeal, but I, unfortunately, don’t see Epic gaining much more ground.
Source: The Verge
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