Apple’s App Store to face trial in Threat to Walled Garden

Apple faces one of its most severe legal threats during the last some years. It is a trial that threatens to overturn its iron control over its Apple app store, which brings huge revenue such as billions of dollars every year while feeding over 1.6 billion iPads, iPhones, and other devices.

Epic Games, the manufacturer of the popular video Fortnite, brought the federal court case. Moreover, Epic wants to tumble the so-called walled garden of the app store, which Apple began building thirteen years ago as part of a strategy conceived by Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple.

Epic claimed that Apple transformed a once-tiny digital app storefront into an illegal monopoly that enfolds smartphone apps for an important slice of their earnings. Apple takes a commission of fifteen percent to thirty percent on purchases made within apps, including everything from subscriptions to digital items in games. Apple denies the accusation of the charge of Epic.

The highly successful formula of Apple helped turn the iPhone manufacturer into one of the most profitable firms of the world, one with a market value that now at most $2.2 trillion. Epic has a market value of around $30 billion. Its ambitions to get a higher hinge in part of its plan to introduce an alternative app store on the Apple iPhone.

Furthermore, the North Carolina firm also wants to break free of the commissions of Apple. Whereas Epic stated that it forked over many (hundreds of millions of) dollars to Apple the expulsion of Fortnite from its app store in August 2020, after Epic added a payment system that bypassed Apple.

Epic Sued Apple on its Management of App Store

Epic sued Apple, initiating a court drama that could highlight the management of Apple for its app store. Both Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and Apple CEO Tim Cook will appear before a federal courtroom in Oakland, California that will be set up to allow for social distancing practices and mask necessity at all times.

Neither of them wanted a jury trial, leaving the decision to Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the United States District Judge, who previously seems to know her ruling will possibly be appealed, given the risks in the case. Much of the evidence in the case rotates around mysterious but crucial arguments regarding the market definitions.

In addition, Epic resists that the iPhone has become so deep-rooted in the society that the mobile device and its ecosystem turned into a monopoly Apple can exploit to develop itself and spoil competition unethically. Whereas Apple claims that it faces noteworthy competition from different alternatives to video games on iPhones.

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