Apple's other actions are just retaliatory: threatening the unreal engine, terminating developer accounts from affiliates, and yanking Apple login. It's those actions that you shouldn't expect.
Epic Games is free to build their own phone and app store platform. There is nothing stopping them. Other than the risk that people don't want to buy into whatever they build. But Apple had the same risks.
If this is truly a good faith negotiation (and not a stunt) on the part of Epic Games, they need to understand they're just losing the negotiation -- that's all. Business is business. Epic Games is just bad at it.
Epic games (AFAIK) started (the public portion of) this conversation by violating terms that Apple set forth in a contract that Epic games agreed to. Apple is defending their contract with their behavior. They have the stronger position unless the law comes to the aid of Epic games (which is what I'm assuming Epic games hopes to induce).
Sidenote: The only law capable of negating a contract is a bankruptcy. Neither party has declared bankruptcy. I have a feeling the law is going to be on Apple's side too.
The precedence Apple wants to set is: break ToS, get kicked off the store. Break ToS and then try to take Apple to court, get kicked off the platform.
It's pretty obvious that Fortnite is just the pawn that Epic used to wage war. This is obvious to Apple too, hence their counterclaim for punitive damages.
This is the same concept as tenant rights. Just because you are renting someone's house doesn't give them complete control over your life. A landlord can't randomly barge into your house (even if technically belongs to them) and sell your stuff.
And before someone comments "But there is no tenancy here", well it's an analogy and it's the same idea. The reason tenant rights exist is because we recognize that having a place to live in is a basic existential need for an individual and therefore we place restrictions on what landlords can get away it, despite the fact that being a landlord is far from a monopoly.
Something similar needs to happen for these bottlenecking platforms that are basically existential requirements for a lot of companies. Also applies to payment processors btw.
Even at much smaller scale, you may need someone more than they need you, and they will negotiate like it - for legal and commercial terms.
Also, terms of service are usually negotiable - presuming you're worth negotiating with. GE has no problem negotiating with Google - you as an individual might have to take what their standard is.
Whats being asked isn't some massive change to their software. Its freedom for the developer and user to have a choice in payment platforms. As much as Apple tries to obfuscate it, the AppStore is not the kernel, its not the graphics layer, its not the file system, its not something that is needed to run software. The other OS components are already being abstracted away to some extent by cross-platform tooling, and the AppStore is way way easier than those.
On one hand, Apple will never take legal responsibility to audit software on their App Store and certify it free from malware, because doing so will be cost prohibitive and/or impossible. But at the same time, they want to claim its this 'utopia' that will get destroyed if users are allowed the freedom to pick a different store. How about you let us decide that?
How much of a cut is Steam taking when you sell software on their store?
How much of a cut will Epic be taking when you sell software on their store?
This is completely different to how much Mastercard charges you for selling stuff from your store.
I've owned and used Apple products continuously for over 30 years, and I'm not ashamed to say that I am rooting HARD for Epic on this. Apple doesn't give a shit about innovation when they are making money hand over fist. They are spending all their time nurturing their cash cow. It's time to butcher that motherfucker.
You mean, Apple, like any grown-up company would do in their place, has rightfully shown Epic the door? Google kicked Fortnite from Play Store for the same reason. And had they tried this against consoles (where devs also pay 30%), they'd be kicked out of the respective console forever.
What's a "non-cry-baby" reaction in your opinion?
Epic hoped for preferential treatment just because they are big, and they've enjoyed preferential treatment on consoles. hey've run into Apple applying their TOS equally to everybody and are now somehow pissed.
It's crazy but I didn't even notice this paradigm shift until they announced their credit card. Apple used to be the company to push boundaries and revolutionize computing in some way every few years. The last real "innovation" I feel Apple has come up with was the Retina display, pushing OEMs everywhere towards higher pixel counts and better overall user experiences. Before that we got everything from the iPhone and iPod and even iTunes, to USB and WiFi brought to the mainstream, to crazy, beautiful designs that worked well, like the iMac G4.
Just for instance working off local memory, The iMac hasn't seen a form factor update since what, 2012 when they slimmed down the curve? Which even then was a minor facelift of the 2007 design at best, which itself was an aluminum facelift. Before then we had new iMac designs every few years, between the G3 in '98, the G4 in '02, and the G5 settling on the current form factor in '04.
Not sure what you mean here. USB was used everywhere and around the time iPhone launched, microusb was used by a large portion of new phones. Apple is pretty much the only actively USB-avoiding company left. They still use a proprietary connection for their devices.
They certainly sped up the wifi on mobile trend, but I would argue with bringing it to the mainstream.
Some innovations I can think of are force touch, fingerprint sensor (arguably), Face ID, T2 chip / hardware security, Touch Bar, the heart sensor on Watch, and (possibly) wireless charging. Now, some of those, like the Touch Bar are widely reviled here, but whether or not you find it useful, it is an innovation.
Design-wise there's been incremental innovations, some of which haven't succeed (scissors keyboard). The Jet Black iPhone was a design innovation, or at least a manufacturing innovation, since they had to preprocess the metal surface so that the black dye would soak in beyond the outer layer.
They should have sued and never have done their "pay direct" thing if they wanted to stay operational on Apple platforms during the lawsuit. Apple couldn't retaliate at that point since any termination attempt would be reversed by a court order.
If they did that, any court hearing the lawsuit would throw it out because Epic would not have standing. Epic had to do it this way to have any hope of a court hearing their case.
0: https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf
That would have made the chances of the lawsuit being thrown out over BS standing issues much higher