Apple and Epic are still involved in a tedious legal battle over the fees imposed by the Cupertino company on developers to have the applications in the App Store. Epic presented itself as a Robin Hood to defend all developers, but it must be a judge who decides who is right. Now a California court has thrown out one of Apple’s counterclaims, one of its first legal defeats.
Epic wins court victory against Apple
In order to understand all the legal litigation that has been generated around these two companies, it is necessary to move until the month of August . It was here that Apple removed the Fortnite game from the App Store after Epic bypassed the store’s payment platform by opting for a direct payment system. That is why in response to this decision, Epic filed a lawsuit accusing Apple of anti-competitive practices.
Apple then filed a counterclaim in September demanding that Epic not use a direct payment system. In order to obtain a fairly high compensation in the counterclaim , Epic was accused of theft in order to have the option of seeking compensation for the damages that have been caused by these practices between companies.
There is already a judicial response to this counterclaim by the US District Judge, Yvonne González Rogers. In this resolution, all the claims that Apple made to Epic as a result of the alleged theft that they made have been rejected . In short, it will not be possible to claim in any case with this resolution the payment of all subscriptions and purchases over which Apple did not have control and therefore did not take any type of commission. The resolution reads as follows:
This is a high-risk breach of contract case and an antitrust case and that’s it in my opinion. It cannot simply be said that it is unduly illicit. Actually, you have to have evidentiary facts.
This judge obviously has not closed the entire case but has responded to a small lawsuit that demanded responsibility for the alleged theft of Epic towards Apple. The judge wanted to be clear when stating that this is a case of breach of contract and of all the conditions that are collected in the App Store but did not want to take action with respect to the rates that did not go through Apple’s control.
With this decision on the table, Apple has stated that it does not agree with it. They believe that Epic clearly violated the contract that was signed with Apple and the conditions of their store were not met. As we have said previously, this does not close the central case that is going ahead and has not yet been resolved. For now, the Fortnite application will continue to be outside the App Store by not complying with the policies despite being requested through the courts.
