> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review. That should be more than enough to compensate the employees reviewing the apps to make sure outside payment links are not scams
I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient. Scammers will update the target of such links, so you can’t just check this at app submission time. You also will have to check from around the world, from different IP address ranges, outside California business hours, etc, because scammer are smart enough to use such info to decide whether to show their scammy page.
Also, even if it becomes ‘only’ hundreds of dollars, I guess only large companies will be able to afford providing an option for outside payments.
> CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees”
He seems to be ignoring the part of the ruling finding that Apple is entitled to "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property".
> The appeals court recommends that the district court calculate a commission that is based on the costs that are necessary for its coordination of external links for linked-out purchases, along with "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property. Costs should not include commission for security and privacy.
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient.
Ignoring the fact Apple isn't doing that anyway right now as others have pointed out:
There are multiple ways to make sure of that without it costing any significant money, eg hashing all scripts that are served on the link and making sure they're the same since review.
Not that they'd ever do the review to begin with, so the hashing won't be done either, but it's something that could be done on iOS/ipados.
And if you consider that infeasible, you might want to check out current CSP best practices, you might be surprised
> I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient.
According to the ruling on page 42, "(c) Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links, and its calculation of its necessary costs for external links should not include the cost associated with the security and privacy features it offers with its IAP"
> Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links
I'm not versed in legalese, so maybe I misunderstand. Isn't it reasonable that Apple receives money for a service they provide, that costs money to run?
The case is really about the opposite: "what payment related services is Apple allowed to force people to use (and therefore pay for)". The court concluded that excludes both the payment service itself as well as the validation of the security of external payment services used in its place.
A service to whom? Protecting users is a service to users, not to developers. This is a selling point of iPhone, and thus Apple receives money from users when they pay for the iPhone.
Think about it this way: totally free apps with no IAP get reviewed by Apple too, and there's no charge to the developer except the $99 Apple Developer Program membership fee, which Epic already pays too.
Will this help other services like Netflix, Spotify? Or am I misreading things.
My understanding, at least several years ago, that Netflix was paying as much to Apple in subscription fees, as they did for their AWS hosting.
I also noticed when upgrading my Spotify account, I couldn't do that through the iphone app itself - I assumed this was because it would break TOS, or they didn't want to pay a massive chunck of the monthly subscription cost to Apple.
I don’t feel great about this ruling. Whatever a “reasonable” fee is supposed to mean, Apple will interpret it to some ridiculous amount. Before the ban, they tried to charge 27%
I don't feel great either, but that's because prices aren't coming down, instead one billion dollar company just keeps more money than another billion (trillion I guess) dollar company, and we've lost some convenience features that Apple maintained, without any gain.
They absolutely will and they will absolutely get away with it. It just won’t be anywhere close to 27%.
There has been craploads of litigation about “Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” licensing over the last two decades, and fees that are percentages of revenue with no cap have survived and there is no reason to believe any of these legal standards will change.
In fact, I think it’s likely that Apple and Google will team up to create a standards body that defines the method for distributing/installing smartphone apps (because this is now in their best interest, not that I want them to). These standards are going to end up using a bunch of patents that you will have to license on FRAND terms.
Yes, the cost is going to go down. Yes, Epic is going to benefit a lot more than any indie developer. Such is life
Yep, there's no reason to believe the fees will only be a few hundred dollars as Sweeney is saying, Apple will absolutely try to extract as much as possible without being sued again. The zero commissions for external links was the right approach.
I'm not even sure about that. This very ruling shows that Apple blatantly violated the law (the previous ruling) and tried to collect as much fee as possible while the case goes through the system.
And Apple isn't afraid of being sued. As long as they can earn more money in revenue than paying for lawyers, that's a net profit for them. They can certainly afford all of this.
It should be based on the app size, so maybe developers will stop shipping apps with a single feature and one button that takes 700 MB because of random bloated third-party SDKs that aren't even used.
> ... the appeals court now suggests that Apple should still be able to charge a “reasonable fee” based on its “actual costs to ensure user security and privacy.”
> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review.
Wow, one step forward, and one step back. Good job, Epic.
The outcome is obviously going to be that Apple's store will have the most apps, with the most up to date versions, and with the most free apps/games. I'm sure Fortnite will do just fine though.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this, why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors?
> why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors
Yeah, this is the fundamental problem, and not something this court ruling does anything to fix. Apple has full control over what software its competitors are allowed to sell. The court's solution? Tell Apple to be more fair when dictating rules to its competitors. Yeah... I'm sure that'll work great.
Because Epic hitched their real desire, we want to do digital distribution independent of Apple, to wanting alternative App Stores and alternative payment methods. And Apple responded with a scheme that does the latter without the former.
Sure you can use your own payment processor, we're still charging 27% though. Sure you can have your own App Store, you still have to go through the same review process though. It seems some of the cracks in this malicious compliance are starting to show.
There’s a Best Buy a few miles from my house. Why aren't I allowed to put my own products on their shelves, or set up a little folding table next to the phone accessories to sell my own cases?
It is not fair to me as a merchant that everyone who wants to buy a phone case goes to Best Buy. That's where all the foot traffic is. It's clearly anti-competitive that they expect me to pay for shelf space I benefit from.
And now they want to charge me to verify that the USB-C cables I'm selling actually work? How is that remotely reasonable? Just because most of my cables are faulty and customers will inevitably go complain to their customer service desk, why should I bear that cost?
Consumers deserve the right to choose accessories from multiple independent merchants inside Best Buy. Suggesting otherwise is anti-consumer, anti-choice, and proof that you hate open and accessible ecosystems.
For this analogy to be comparable, you would first have to consider that Best Buy, together with Walmart, owns 99.9999% of all store real estate in the world. You would also have to consider that the "shelf space" in this case is free and comes at zero cost to Best Buy; in fact, giving you virtual shelf space increases the amount of traffic that comes into their stores, resulting in a benefit to themselves.
Your analogy as presented was so lacking in merit you might as well have been talking about cats and leprechauns for how completely nonsensical it was to bring it up in the context of Apple.
The "reasonable" fees are not gonna be only a few hundred bucks, it'll still be a percentage of revenue but smaller than 27%. Apple will try to extract as much as possible and will not tolerate a non-percentage fee.
Because the three of them are all making their store business decisions outside of CA such that it's far harder to have California law applied to them?
Will Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve and another software store have to allow mini stores on their platforms? That's to say software with its own payment system, inside of a free app?
Tim Cook has been absolutely fantastic for Apple shareholders and absolutely awful for anyone else, particularly the customers.
The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.
Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys. Source: used to be one. Left the ecosystem when they started treating the RFCs like toilet paper.
At one point, there was a case for preventing scammy and fraudulent apps. For a long time, the ios App store had a much higher quality than android.
But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.
> The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.
Why?
There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.
If I want to "do software development in any meaningful way", I'm not using a tablet. I'm using something with MacOS or GNU/Linux on it.
People willingly pay what Apple's charging for the iPad in the face of competition from a different OS and different classes of device, so I'm not really seeing the problem, especially when I can hand my technologically-handicapped 65-year-old mother an iPad and not have to worry as much about her installing something that will wreck every device on my parents' network or compromise her bank accounts or something.
Besides, the whole "locked-down device" wasn't Tim's idea, it was Steve's. There are plenty of reasons to gripe about Tim Cook, but "the iPad is too locked down" isn't one of them.
> There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.
I think this is my entire problem with most of these conversations. When they say "The walled garden has to end." ... they mean "YOUR walled garden has to end.".
I also like the Walled Garden. Do I think Apple should be able to charge more than Stripe? No.
I wish they would stop conflating the gate keeping price to enter the walled garden being too high with the wall garden and the gate being a moral wrong.
I'm a consumer too and I despise having 20 different logins for each vendor to extract data from and the resulting increased exposure to identity theft. I'm grateful for Steam's dominance in the gaming space, my Playstation Sony account was hacked and was a nightmare cleaning up. It is not my job to care about developer margins, all the apps I care about are able to stay in business regardless of Apple's fees and if they cannot then they should charge more. I also dread the idea of having to spend time cleaning spammy "Patriot.Eagle App Store" from my elderly parent's devices if the walled garden is fully removed in the future, I know that shit is coming.
Hard disagree. Tim should focus on fixing their software. It has become extremely buggy and it needs to be fixed. No one buying an iPad cares about running some custom browser and supporting it is pointless and is what makes the software emote complex and worse. He should take better care of his paying customers rather than engaging with opinionated activists.
>For iOS 27 and next year’s other major operating system updates — including macOS 27 — the company is focused on improving the software’s quality and underlying performance.
-via Bloomberg -18d
Edit: almost can’t be true if they’re going to try to push Siri hard :-/
> Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys
The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.
Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.
I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?
Tim Cook, or any CEO, is accountable to the shareholders, so job well done it seems. It's still the user's choice if they want to live in the walled garden or not, and lots of people do, so why would they change it?
I heart that at least in the US losing access to Facetime would be a serious loss in social status. So then this would be a real hurdle WRT user choice.
insist on Apple IAP links/buttons to be the same as buttons/links to external payments. But they can't ask for the outgoing links/buttons to be less prominent
charge for links/buttons to external payment, but not as they please. One interpretation is that it has to be based on real cost and can't in any way be tied to IAP costs.
It feels like courts are not doing a good job promoting "competition".
- Apple shouldn't be able to charge for external payments, come on.
- Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does. Epic knows exactly how predatory that is, betting some kids will find ways to spend thousands and the parents will be helpless. Ideally you'd have a law mandating refunds, but without that, there should be mandatory disclosure on the IAP screen, at least for microtransaction games. You can't have fair "competition" when you have an information asymmetry, and if these rulings don't mandate that, you'll open the floodgate for these gaming companies to screw over parents.
Antitrust laws were written in the early 1900s and updated through the 1950s. Credit cards weren't available until 1966 and didn't become widely used until the 1990s. Digital platforms weren't a thing until the late 90s/early 2000s and the Apple app store didn't exist until 2008.
The courts can only enforce the laws on the books. Congress needs to update the laws, but they won't because they are hopelessly corrupt :(
Lina Khan did try and regulate. She had some successes, but the major cases w/r/t concentration of power against Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple have all moved slowly and (so far) failed to result in break ups.
Why shouldn't Apple be able to charge whatever the fuck they want on their own platform, while users of their platform can? Now Sweeney can sell vbux to kids and Apple has to just grin and bear it?
Apple needs to be broken up and separated from the App Store. Apple sells devices, and I buy one expecting to own it outright. When you own something, you should be able to install whatever you want without interference from Apple.
How is the iPhone different from the Macs? I can install anything I want from any source on the Mac, but I can't do that on the iPhone. Doesn't make any sense.
> - Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does.
Apple has no official App Store refund policy, either for IAP or for upfront paid apps. I've already looked for one. There's of course a form to request a refund, but refunds are entirely at Apple's discretion, for any reason or no reason, and Apple often exercises its discretion to refuse refunds.
The App Store was built on iTunes and used the same backend. The refund process hasn’t changed since then. Funny enough before the App Store you could buy Apple curated apps for your iPod.
Have you heard reports of Apple not granting refunds?
I would think making sure outside payment links aren’t scams will be more expensive than that because checking that once isn’t sufficient. Scammers will update the target of such links, so you can’t just check this at app submission time. You also will have to check from around the world, from different IP address ranges, outside California business hours, etc, because scammer are smart enough to use such info to decide whether to show their scammy page.
Also, even if it becomes ‘only’ hundreds of dollars, I guess only large companies will be able to afford providing an option for outside payments.
He seems to be ignoring the part of the ruling finding that Apple is entitled to "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property".
> The appeals court recommends that the district court calculate a commission that is based on the costs that are necessary for its coordination of external links for linked-out purchases, along with "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property. Costs should not include commission for security and privacy.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/11/apple-app-store-fees-ex...
Apple wanted 27% and Epic thinks it should be 0%. The lower court will have to pick a number in between the two.
Not that they'd ever do the review to begin with, so the hashing won't be done either, but it's something that could be done on iOS/ipados.
And if you consider that infeasible, you might want to check out current CSP best practices, you might be surprised
According to the ruling on page 42, "(c) Apple should receive no commission for the security and privacy features it offers to external links, and its calculation of its necessary costs for external links should not include the cost associated with the security and privacy features it offers with its IAP"
I'm not versed in legalese, so maybe I misunderstand. Isn't it reasonable that Apple receives money for a service they provide, that costs money to run?
Think about it this way: totally free apps with no IAP get reviewed by Apple too, and there's no charge to the developer except the $99 Apple Developer Program membership fee, which Epic already pays too.
My understanding, at least several years ago, that Netflix was paying as much to Apple in subscription fees, as they did for their AWS hosting.
I also noticed when upgrading my Spotify account, I couldn't do that through the iphone app itself - I assumed this was because it would break TOS, or they didn't want to pay a massive chunck of the monthly subscription cost to Apple.
Apologies for being unable to find a better source at the moment, but it links to this press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/japan-fair-trade-comm...
There has been craploads of litigation about “Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” licensing over the last two decades, and fees that are percentages of revenue with no cap have survived and there is no reason to believe any of these legal standards will change.
In fact, I think it’s likely that Apple and Google will team up to create a standards body that defines the method for distributing/installing smartphone apps (because this is now in their best interest, not that I want them to). These standards are going to end up using a bunch of patents that you will have to license on FRAND terms.
Yes, the cost is going to go down. Yes, Epic is going to benefit a lot more than any indie developer. Such is life
I'm not even sure about that. This very ruling shows that Apple blatantly violated the law (the previous ruling) and tried to collect as much fee as possible while the case goes through the system.
And Apple isn't afraid of being sued. As long as they can earn more money in revenue than paying for lawyers, that's a net profit for them. They can certainly afford all of this.
Google are doing exactly the same as Apple previously were doing, mandatory from end of next month - January 28, 2026.
Their new requirements: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
> Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review.
Wow, one step forward, and one step back. Good job, Epic.
The outcome is obviously going to be that Apple's store will have the most apps, with the most up to date versions, and with the most free apps/games. I'm sure Fortnite will do just fine though.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this, why would the court allow Apple to act as a gatekeeper for their competitors?
Yeah, this is the fundamental problem, and not something this court ruling does anything to fix. Apple has full control over what software its competitors are allowed to sell. The court's solution? Tell Apple to be more fair when dictating rules to its competitors. Yeah... I'm sure that'll work great.
Sure you can use your own payment processor, we're still charging 27% though. Sure you can have your own App Store, you still have to go through the same review process though. It seems some of the cracks in this malicious compliance are starting to show.
It is not fair to me as a merchant that everyone who wants to buy a phone case goes to Best Buy. That's where all the foot traffic is. It's clearly anti-competitive that they expect me to pay for shelf space I benefit from.
And now they want to charge me to verify that the USB-C cables I'm selling actually work? How is that remotely reasonable? Just because most of my cables are faulty and customers will inevitably go complain to their customer service desk, why should I bear that cost?
Consumers deserve the right to choose accessories from multiple independent merchants inside Best Buy. Suggesting otherwise is anti-consumer, anti-choice, and proof that you hate open and accessible ecosystems.
Your analogy as presented was so lacking in merit you might as well have been talking about cats and leprechauns for how completely nonsensical it was to bring it up in the context of Apple.
What a strange choice of words I though, clicked on author name:
"You can find his irregular musings on BlueSky: @kyleor.land.".
I see.
The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.
Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys. Source: used to be one. Left the ecosystem when they started treating the RFCs like toilet paper.
But now? There are tons of scammy and fraudulent apps on the app store. If you try to search for any popular app, you'll be presented with a dozen apps that look similar with similar names and logos.
I don't even know how this is possible. FOSS repos have more security than that...
Why?
There's an alternative: Android. I'm perfectly free to use that instead. I don't.
If I want to "do software development in any meaningful way", I'm not using a tablet. I'm using something with MacOS or GNU/Linux on it.
People willingly pay what Apple's charging for the iPad in the face of competition from a different OS and different classes of device, so I'm not really seeing the problem, especially when I can hand my technologically-handicapped 65-year-old mother an iPad and not have to worry as much about her installing something that will wreck every device on my parents' network or compromise her bank accounts or something.
Besides, the whole "locked-down device" wasn't Tim's idea, it was Steve's. There are plenty of reasons to gripe about Tim Cook, but "the iPad is too locked down" isn't one of them.
I think this is my entire problem with most of these conversations. When they say "The walled garden has to end." ... they mean "YOUR walled garden has to end.".
I also like the Walled Garden. Do I think Apple should be able to charge more than Stripe? No.
I wish they would stop conflating the gate keeping price to enter the walled garden being too high with the wall garden and the gate being a moral wrong.
>For iOS 27 and next year’s other major operating system updates — including macOS 27 — the company is focused on improving the software’s quality and underlying performance.
-via Bloomberg -18d
Edit: almost can’t be true if they’re going to try to push Siri hard :-/
The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.
Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.
I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?
Apple wins partial reversal of sanctions in Epic Games antitrust lawsuit
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... (https://archive.ph/Cbi3f)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46237312
insist on Apple IAP links/buttons to be the same as buttons/links to external payments. But they can't ask for the outgoing links/buttons to be less prominent
charge for links/buttons to external payment, but not as they please. One interpretation is that it has to be based on real cost and can't in any way be tied to IAP costs.
can't use scare screens on external purchases
Both articles appear to point at the same 9th circuit appeals court ruling:
The Ars piece points at:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/US-Co...
Which appears to be the same ruling as the Reuters piece links to:
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/lgvdqxweopo/...
As such, I believe that, yes, this is the same ruling reported by both Ars and Reuters.
Devil's always in the details. But in this instance, any even partial win is still a win. Something is better than nothing.
I mean, it's certainly not for lack of business insight. And you don't need the internet to sell applications.
If Jobs was still here, he would have fired all the fat management.
shame on you Apple, you are acting like M$!
- Apple shouldn't be able to charge for external payments, come on.
- Force prominent disclosure of refund policies. Epic Games doesn't allow them for IAP. Apple does. Epic knows exactly how predatory that is, betting some kids will find ways to spend thousands and the parents will be helpless. Ideally you'd have a law mandating refunds, but without that, there should be mandatory disclosure on the IAP screen, at least for microtransaction games. You can't have fair "competition" when you have an information asymmetry, and if these rulings don't mandate that, you'll open the floodgate for these gaming companies to screw over parents.
The courts can only enforce the laws on the books. Congress needs to update the laws, but they won't because they are hopelessly corrupt :(
Courts don't allow you to submit false evidence yet somehow they need to update their produces to handle AI generated false submissions?
The issue is enforcement. Plain and simple. The anti-trust on the books are fine; no more amount of written laws will make regulators regulate.
How is the iPhone different from the Macs? I can install anything I want from any source on the Mac, but I can't do that on the iPhone. Doesn't make any sense.
Apple has no official App Store refund policy, either for IAP or for upfront paid apps. I've already looked for one. There's of course a form to request a refund, but refunds are entirely at Apple's discretion, for any reason or no reason, and Apple often exercises its discretion to refuse refunds.
Good for you, but you're only one user out of more than a billion.
> I’ve had an iTunes account since 2003
I'm not sure how that's relevant, because the App Store opened in 2008. Also, Apple had a different CEO at the time.
Have you heard reports of Apple not granting refunds?
I'm not talking about the technical process. Like I already said, "There's of course a form to request a refund".
> Have you heard reports of Apple not granting refunds?
Yes, many. Indeed, I've heard it from my own customers, as I'm an App Store developer myself.
Epic celebrates “the end of the Apple Tax” after appeals court win in iOS payments case
Different from gacha at least.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
It's incredibly similar to what Apple had before.