Tim Sweeney is using language in a way to make it appear as though the recent ruling ordered Fortnite's reinstatement, and a lot of people are falling for it.
Epic wanted their own store and they got their own store. It cost them and Apple a bunch of money, which indirectly is not good for anyone's customers... my sense of justice is not perplexed as to why they are not allowed back in.
Would you want to do business with someone who just sued you after breaking their previous contract with you?
They don't. Quoting the article:
> "Apple has blocked our Fortnite submission so we cannot release to the US App Store or to the Epic Games Store for iOS in the European Union," Epic stated via its Fortnite account
If someone prevents me from selling my own product in my own store then it's not my store.
That’s something they could’ve avoided by using different IDs for different stores, like everyone else does on e.g. Amazon AppStore. (Maybe even Samsung and Play Store use different IDs)
But that’s assuming they’re not just refusing to release anywhere until Apple relents in the US.
You know what? It's also not fucking Apple's phone anymore, it's the damn phone of the customer who paid to buy it. They should be the only party who gets to decide whether they can install perfectly functional applications on it.
Apple keeps trying to twist that fact away, over and over again - They are morally in the wrong. Clearly so.
Apple’s App Store is Apple’s, insofar as that if Apple disappears, obviously its App Store ceases to work.
As I say above, Apple is legally permitted to do this, but I think they're inviting additional and heavy-handed legal interdiction. They're burning so much of their brand and goodwill on this war against developers. They went so far as to risk actual prison time for their executives, just so they could screw developers out of as much money as possible.
https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_now_showing_warnings_on_eu_ap...
It's poorly worded for maximum FUD.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/05/that_eu_app_store_warning...
And fwiw we have hard evidence of Apple acting in bad faith. Gruber keeps giving Apple PR the benefit of the doubt but they absolutely do not deserve it.
> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”
from https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36... (page 36)
these people should be jailed for contempt
Its about freedom and openness of platforms.
‘It’s fine because people will ignore it’ doesn’t make something okay.
>‘It’s fine because people will ignore it’ doesn’t make something okay.
I can give an anecdotal example of my father who is bit old, knows some basic tech, but had been at the receiving end of some financial fraud (some clowns pretended to be stock trading experts, thankfully nothing happened as he figured it out before any money was sent).
You and I might be technologically sophisticated enough to know what's what. That being said I feel the likelihood of scammy apps like those on App store for iOS a lot less likely but not zero. That being said, on Chrome, one does have many many options for reliable payment gateways and not using them can be an easy way to figure out if it is risky or not.
If Google were to force Google Pay on Chrome, that would be clearly wrong. Options should exist.
And I feel Apple should allow Fortnite for that very reason. You cannot ban someone for not wanting to use Apple Pay, the same way Chrome cannot and should not ban a website if they are using a non Google related payment gateway.
From all of them - take it away from Google too. Frankly - Microsoft never actually got much buy in for their store, but take it away from them as well.
Hardware that has only a single approved distribution channel for software, that is owned by someone other than the owner of the hardware, shouldn't be legal.
Further - if you own a piece of hardware, you legally should own EVERY fucking key. If there's a lock in that device, hardware or software based, that has a key - you get a damn copy.
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Some physical comparisons that show how outrageously unethical this setup is:
You buy a home, but your realtor gets the only copy of the keys. "Don't worry" they say, "I'll just pop by and open er up whenever you need to get in and out. Oh, and by the way, I don't like Ikea - so I won't open the door if you're trying to move Ikea furniture in. Great working with you guys, enjoy your new home!".
You've just bought a new car, you tried turning into your neighborhood, but suddenly the car stops. You call the dealer: "Oh, I see your neighborhood road was paved by PavingCo, They don't pay our manufacturers' yearly inspection fee, so we can't certify that our car can safely drive on that road. So we disable it when the GPS detects you're about to drive there."
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This is fundamentally about ownership. Hardware manufacturers are playing with utter fire here, because this is the first time in history there exists enough infrastructure that a device can phone home and ask "Is this ok?" to the maker, rather than operating as the owner desires.
As far as I'm concerned - you don't own a device that does that. You're just renting it, and the manufacturer can and will extort you with rent-seeking behavior at EVERY turn.
Phones are only the first stop - this is going to spread to absolutely everything that uses electricity unless this gets extinguished real fast. We're already starting to see the same games in Cars, IoT devices, TVs, etc...
I'm eagerly awaiting the day my drill stops working because I'm not trying to drill the manufacturers' overpriced screws with it...
Too many devs have their livelihood at the mercy of Apple's(and Google's) Damocles's sword. At least with Google you can easily sideload.
If even megacorpos like Epic have issues with Apple imagine what being an indie dev or small company will be like.
The politicians of course only care about the PR stunt and give them concessions either way.
Job creation, retention or destruction is a powerful political tool that companies use everywhere as leverage to get politicians to do what they want. You can see the auto sector in Germany. So the US defending Apple is understandable. All countries protect their domestic big players.
The outrage would be massive, that would be giant scandal
Should Microsoft ever make a move now, Valve isn't completely at their mercy.
They should have made it attractive for developers already targeting UNIX like systems, with PlayStation and Android NDK, to actually bother shipping GNU/Linux builds of their games.
Instead, they translate Windows games.
No, they aren't. Valve is way, way too big a bear for Microsoft to poke. If they banned Steam, the backlash would be severe.
It would also result in even more users switching to Linux to keep access to the games they've already paid for, and which work under Linux due to proton.
Microsoft is at Valve's mercy. Valve doesn't need Microsoft, but Microsoft very badly needs Steam around to keep gamers on windows.
To a platform emulating Windows? (no need to correct me on how WINE works)
If at all they would be migrating to Nintendo and Sony consoles, if not having second thoughts about XBox consoles and cloud/GeForce Now.
Additionally, most of what Valve stands for will be gone the day Gabe is no longer at the company, enjoy while it lasts.
Not only did they do this, they then filed suit to say that Apple shouldn't have been allowed to suspend their account—and lost (though arguably won the broader war since anti-steering is currently dead).
There are a ton of things Apple is doing wrong around developer stuff and anti-steering rules and all of it, but I dunno, I feel pretty good about them saying to a specific developer, “actually, you've shown yourself to be willing to ignore the legal agreements you sign, so we're not going to be doing business with you any longer“. Epic's stunt should cost them, if they then want to talk about how they've martyred themselves for developers everywhere. Good work, but a martyr who comes back to life isn't really a martyr, right?
I don’t deny Apple’s pettiness… Nonetheless, can you provide a different example of why devs are afraid of publicly criticizing Apple?
As for different reason, how about this official policy from ~2015:
> If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150411105225/https://developer...
But Epic did go out of their way to ‘trash’ Apple in the press. For this and other reasons I can’t generally relate to Epic. (e.g. targeting kids with microtransactions, burning piles of money on Epic Games exclusives.)
I would also not want to do business with Epic
https://www.beuc.eu/reports/game-over-consumers-fight-fairer...
So don't put yourself in the position where you have to do business with Epic, like forcing them to use your store to get software on the platform over a billion users use.
Apple could easily just do what various courts have ordered them to do: Open up the ecosystem and allow anyone to distribute apps. This has the added benefit of allowing apple to stop doing business with the entities they don't like, because they are no longer involving themselves in a transaction between the user and the business the user has chosen.
It will also save their executives from a prison sentence if they keep this up.
abiding by apple's abusive TOS won't improve developers' situations, you have to stand up to them.
Apple put themselves in the position that they have to do business with entities they don't approve of, thankfully the courts are reminding them of this. Soon one or more of the apple execs will wind up in prison.
Every subscription service should have a banner on their pages saying signing up through iOS takes 30%. Many just disabled signing up.
Of course maybe this isn't the best example since Apple actually made it against their rules to tell users it'd be cheaper to purchase on their site.
Apple's rules undeniably cost end users money. Epic proved it by taking some of that 30% fee and giving it back to the consumer (you got more Fortnite credits buying on Epic store instead of Apple store).
Why people try to defend Apple I'll never understand, my guess is some people who own an iPhone have decided that's 'their team' and who wants to see their team lose? But I'm not sure.
It's this. Apple somehow managed to cultivate cult-like behavior in their users, which I've also never understood.
Be Apple, innovate, give us second iPhone moment so you wouldn't worry so much about revenue drop in services. Or make payment via Apple so good, your customers would go for it even with price difference. Just stop stupid, monopolistic tactics.
As I do with Microsoft, I only use Apple products when its absolutely necessary.
My personal choices are whatever is best, Fedora for my home OS(Don't call Fedora Linux, Fedora is so far and beyond Linux, you don't want to associate them).
My Pixel phone... Idk, looking for something new. But at least I have been using Fdroid and its pretty amazing.
But yeah I bend to their will when I'm doing corporate stuff, never personal.
Apple has built the touchscreen smartphone that the world to date still could not move on from, and it still leads in that category. By working both hardware and software fronts, they have grinded out an ecosystem that was compelling and money-making to small developers (handling legal and tax logistics pretty much worldwide for you) and to the end users.
Apple Pay is yet another example: you’d think somebody would have come up with a way to conveniently and securely pay with, say, a phone, and yet everybody needed for the teacher to do it first and only then jumped on copying the feature with barely enough creativity to call it “%SOME_BRAND_NAME% Pay” and put their logo on it. Now it’s incredibly convenient, it’s everywhere online, and it basically turns every shop out there into Amazon’s patented “one-click purchase” experience.
Saying they should not be able to profit from their innovation because they just did too good of a job intuitively seems like the opposite of American values. This is not some rusty ISP monopoly with a geographically captive market, sitting on decades old software as secure as Swiss cheese, doing mostly nothing. People switch between ecosystems all the time, there are no strong lock-ins; you have to be on top of it to stay competitive, and Apple generally is. This is one of the rare cases where a company keeps generating and implementing (pretty well) idea after idea in multiple areas with a valuation, contrary to trends, built not on empty future promises but on a concrete, sound business model that provides real value to people who are willing to pay for it, despite having a lot of choice.
I don't care if they're "rusty" or or not. Sell a good hammer, make money selling the hammer: Everything is fine.
Sell a good hammer, double dip with rent seeking and charge for every nail the user drives? Fuck off. Happy to see them get wrecked in the court system.
If you like this one, with all the futuristic tech it brings, don’t get on a high horse whenever those who dare to innovate also dare to make money from it. Have the brains and the balls to do it yourself and be as flush as they are.
This isn’t “rent”—landlords don’t have to incessantly innovate.
They even went as far as to blocking downloads from third-party app stores:
> The Verge has confirmed that the game is no longer available to download on iOS from the Epic Games Store or the alternative marketplace AltStore PAL in the EU, where it had previously been available. It’s not yet clear if Apple blocked the game’s availability through those stores, or if Epic itself chose to make it unavailable. We’ve reached out to both Apple and Epic for comment.
That tells you the reach into how Apple can block app installs even from third-party app stores.
Also the situation is much more complicated. In the EU, Fortnite has been available for a while through their own Epic Games AppStore. This submission seems to have been for both, the EU distribution and the US AppStore. I am surprised that such a situation is even possible, I thought if you opt-in your app/account for EU alternative AppStores you are kind of blocked from the standard AppStore submission as the requirements for the alternative distribution path are different from the AppStore. At the same time it seems to give Epic more arguments for pressure on Apple as sabotaging the release in the EU might be against the DMA laws.
So most companies/devs will be able to just publish on App Store, and apple can after that "verify" that the app confirms with their standards.
glimshe•4h ago
binarymax•4h ago
To be clear I think Apple is in the wrong here and the App Store tax is absurd. But what court decision says that Epic won?
kanwisher•4h ago
rafram•4h ago
The judge didn’t say Fortnite had to be let back on the App Store. She said that Apple needed to allow payments through external payment processors. Apple can’t force Epic to use their payment system anymore, but they absolutely still can decide they don’t want to distribute Fortnite on the App Store. It’s their store.
terinjokes•3h ago
vessenes•3h ago
hajile•3h ago