The legal tug-of-war between the two companies has been going on for several years, and according to one judge (who most recently presided over the case before both Apple and Epic Games appealed), the Cupertino-based tech giant’s response is inadequate.

Apple has already come under pressure in the European Union, where sideloading of apps from outside the Apple App Store is allowed on the iPhone. Like iOS, iPadOS could also face a similar ruling from the European Commission (calling it a closed platform), so Fortnite could show up in both places, which is the cause of the ongoing legal battle between Tim Sweeney’s and Tim Cook’s companies.

According to Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers, Apple still needs to make more changes. In exchange for allowing third-party apps, Apple would continue to use a 27% profit margin for larger developers and 12% for smaller ones, and that’s why Epic Games is suing Apple again because the Sweeney-led company says Apple has acted in defiance of the judge’s ruling. The case is still ongoing, and it remains to be seen if Rogers will order Apple to comply with the ruling.

A few days after the hearing, which was prompted by Epic’s complaint that the iPhone maker was not following the 2021 ruling very closely, Rogers told an Apple executive that it sounded to her like the goal was to preserve the business model and revenue the company has used in the past. The judge said there were thousands of people involved, and she didn’t understand that none of them actually said that developer costs should be reconsidered. Epic didn’t like the fact that developers have to pay essentially the same outside the App Store as inside, and Apple’s defense was that they didn’t know about the calculations…

According to Apple, only 38 of the 65,000 developers eligible to switch have done so, and none of them can be considered lead developers. That sounds odd.

Source: WCCFTech, Bloomberg