Epic vows to bring Fortnite to iOS as court slams Apple’s ”cover-up“

Epic CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said in a Zoom call with press Wednesday night that the company is “going to do everything we can to bring Fortnite back to the iOS App Store next week.” That decision comes after a federal district court found late Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction designed to allow iOS developers to steer customers to alternate payment processors for in-app purchases.

That 2021 injunction wound its way through years of appellate review until January 2024, when the Supreme Court declined to hear a final attempt by Apple to overturn it. Since then, the District Court for Northern California has been holding a series of evidentiary hearings examining the internal development of Apple’s so-called “compliance plan” for the injunction.

In a scathing Wednesday night order, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers determined that Apple had engaged in a plan to “thwart the injunction’s goals,” and then engaged in an “obvious cover-up” to prevent that plan from being revealed.

Apple’s response to the initial injunction “strained credulity,” the judge said, by charging a new 27 percent commission for off-app purchases and adding new barriers such as “full page ‘scare’ screens” to “increase friction” for users seeking off-app payment alternatives. These moves demonstrated Apple’s intent to “continue its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream,” the judge writes.

More than that, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said that Apple’s in-court testimony in initial hearings on that conduct were in “stark contrast” to evidence that came to the court later via contemporaneous business documents. Those showed that “Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option,” the judge wrote. Apple VP of Finance Alex Roman “outright lied under oath” in testimony about Apple’s internal deliberations, according to the court order, while CEO Tim Cook “chose poorly” in actively deciding not to comply with the court’s injunction.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote that Apple’s conduct in court represents a “clear and convincing violation” of her initial injunction that has been referred to the District Attorney for Northern California “to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.”

“Apple’s continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote. “This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays.”

In a statement provided to Ars Technica, an Apple spokesperson said, “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.”

An Epic return

With the new court order in place, Epic says it will once again submit a version of Fortnite to the iOS App Store in the US in the next week or so. That new version will offer players the option to use standard Apple App Store payments or its own, cheaper “Epic Direct Payment” system to purchase in-game currency and items.

That would mirror the system that was briefly in place for iOS players in August 2020, when Epic added alternate payment options to iOS Fortnite in intentional violation of what were then Apple’s store policies. Apple removed Fortnite from the iOS App Store hours later, setting off a legal battle that seems to finally be reaching its conclusion.

For those few hours when Epic Direct Payments were available on iOS Fortnite in 2020, Sweeney said that about 50 percent of customers “decided to give Epic a shot,” going through an additional step to register and pay through an Epic account on a webpage outside the app itself (and saving 20 percent on their purchase in the process). The other roughly 50 percent of customers decided to pay a higher price in exchange for the convenience of paying directly in the app through the iOS account they already had set up, Sweeney said. “Consumers were making the choice… and it was a wonderful thing to see,” he said.