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Comment by jamesdhutton | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain exactly how Apple "blocks" Unreal Engine? I was under the impression that it's a 3rd-party library, available directly from Epic, that anybody is free to link their game to. So I'm struggling to understand the mechanism by which Apple blocks it. Any clarity on this would be appreciated.

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Epic needs access to Apple's developer tools and documentation to continue developing the Unreal Engine software and libraries for macOS and iOS.

Without access to those things, it would be difficult for Epic to produce new versions of the Unreal Engine, and game developers wouldn't want to use it any more.

Yes but any developer can have his or her own account that gives access to every tool, only for pushing software to the store it's vital to have that one particular account for Epic. Epic will lose perks like direct access to performance tuning teams at Apple, but that's not something you can't do without.

So "difficult" would mean that you need to improvise a bit, but they're still able to develop just like any developer. If you want to put your own cocoapod out, you don't need a developer license to do so and if someone else wants to use your cocoapod they just need their own developer account.

Legally Epic would lose access to all Apple developer IP including iOS SDKs and Xcode. You have to click through an EULA to access this stuff. And you can bet that Apple would have sought a court order to enforce it, had they prevailed.

Just a note, this isn't past tense. The court case is only beginning. This was only about the initial injunction. The court just told Apple and Epic "cool it, stop fighting each other in public and harming your customers, fight each other in court".

Got it. Thanks.

Apple threatened to block their complete developer account [1]. That would include blocking Epic from using dev tools.

-[1]:https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/17/apple-terminate-epic-de...

they revoked Epic's developer account. if Epic is restricted from getting the tools needed to further develop Unreal Engine, that effectively prevents Epic from doing further development on it.

Aren’t the tools freely available without a developer account?

While you can download Xcode with just a regular Apple ID, you can't really test your code on an iOS device without an Apple developer account, so the usefulness would be limited.

I have to use my own developer account basically every time I build an app for a customer until they got around to either inviting me to their team or creating their personal developer account.

Unless Epic is filled with developers that never ever launched their own application not being part of the Epic developer account is an annoyance (and a familiar one for most iOS developers) at most.

You don't need to deploy an SDK the only thing you would deploy are test builds of games that use the updated SDK.

Even those come with a license, and Apple could probably have specifically revoked that license from Epic.

(I'm just speculating here.)

It's not so much about what's technically possible, but about what's legally allowed.

The tools are. On-device testing isn't.

It is, but it is quite limited. I don't think you can really "distribute" your app in any meaningful sense of the word, and you also have to reinstall it every seven days.

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