The digital economy will see some more energetic competition, the lack of which is becoming a global concern-the Epic suit in the United States case took place amid similar App Store fights Apple is facing in Japan, India, and the European Union. Once the court order goes into effect, and developers can employ their own payment systems from inside apps, Apple’s tightly sealed ecosystem will look a little less impervious. To avoid giving Apple this cut, some companies made subscriptions unavailable through their apps altogether-you can access the Netflix app, for instance, only after signing up through a separate Web browser.
Since Apple introduced its App Store, in 2008, any money spent on or through apps, whether, say, a subscription to Tinder or extra lives in Candy Crush, were subject to the thirty-per-cent fee. This might sound like a matter of administrative quibbling, but it has major implications for users and developers alike. In other words, when the ruling takes effect, in three months, Apple will no longer be fully in control of how users pay for things through iPhone apps. The company would no longer be able to ban developers from using their own payment systems through iPhone apps other “purchasing mechanisms” would be allowed, she wrote. (Epic did the same with Google, which removed Fortnite from its Google Play marketplace for the same reason.) Last week, this act of strategic legal trolling paid off when the lawsuit concluded and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers made a surprising and rare decision against Apple. Apple, registering the infringement, promptly removed the Fortnite app from its marketplace, giving the game developer an opening to sue for antitrust and anticompetitive behavior. The company mandates that all so-called in-app purchases be made through Apple, which usually takes a thirty-per-cent flat fee.īut Epic’s provocation worked. In introducing this change, Epic was deliberately running afoul of Apple’s App Store regulations. The game’s menu now offered two options for purchasing its in-game currency, V-Bucks: buying through the Apple App Store at the regular price of $9.99, or via a new “Epic direct payment” at a discount, for $7.99. Last August, the video-game developer Epic Games released a new version of the iPhone app for its popular online game Fortnite, with an arcane but significant update.
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