Fortnite is now available again on the US App Store | Hacker News Reader

Fortnite is now available again on the US App Store

apps.apple.com

35 pointsminimaxir10 comments

It’s incredible how quickly Apple changed course on this after being told to have the person responsible front court next week to explain in person why they feel they can defy Gonzalez Rogers’ orders. It should be said, there’s a lot of nuance here, as reinstating Fortnite on the App Store after being banned for their ToS violation is not the same case as the one at hand. However, it seems the internal calculus at Apple has shifted dramatically, and there’s genuine fear of the company and the executives being held accountable in a meaningful way, never mind the court of public opinion. They’ve really pissed off the court through their actions, and it’s not going well for them so far, at all.

> it seems the internal calculus at Apple has shifted dramatically, and there’s genuine fear of the company and the executives being held accountable in a meaningful way

Indeed the judge already referred one Apple VP to the prosecutor for investigation of perjury. I'm guessing none of the other VPs want to step foot in that court.

Still, Apple has an appeal pending, so they could still ultimately overturn the judge's decisions.

I think the reading people missed is that Epic won the original case, but YGR was hesitant to "set prices" or outright prohibit "charging for access to the platform", but expected Apple to allow competition. They very poorly misread a softball judgment as "we can still charge everyone 30% as long as people have choices how we do so", and that was an extremely wrong interpretation. Instead of creating an environment where Apple could compete with other providers and still make some reasonable cut, now Apple gets to demand 0%.

Epic threw everything in the case, but they really only needed to win on any one count to win the case.

It's hard to say Epic really won when they lost so many of their arguments. This case could have ended in Apple being required to allow third party stores like they do in the EU, and that would have been much better for Epic and for consumers.

I'm glad the judge is willing to enforce her judgement though. When it first came out it wasn't clear whether enforcement would be meaningful.

It's really hard to bring a case against one of the most powerful and valuable companies on the planet. The strategy here was obviously to throw every possible complaint out, knowing that not all of them will work. You don't go to court expecting a full sweep, you expect to land a hit. Bringing ten claims is giving them ten chances to win. Which Epic did, and ultimately, the downstream effects of this will end up upending the mobile app economy entirely.

I think the outcome here was inevitable, but I'm certainly annoyed how long it takes. Epic has lucked out in the fact that Apple very unwisely angered the judge, which is a really, really bad idea. It's common for nothing to actually change until all of the appeals are exhausted, and this case probably has another five years of appeals and motions and stuff ahead of it. (Google v. Oracle, another huge big tech case, took 11 years!) But YGR is clearly so irritated at Apple's bull---- she decided to make things effective immediately.

Apple's game of course, is about protecting the 30% cut at all cost. Once it is dead and buried and the appeals are over, I suspect Apple will look to globally unify it's rules again, so you'll probably see things pioneered in the EU, like third party stores, and things pioneered in the US, like anti-steering rules, eventually get applied globally once they start having to compete fairly on IAP costs.

Five years. That’s how long it took to resolve this, and Apple still has some appeals left. I hope Apple will open up the US App Store a bit more to be comparable with the EU App Store, but I’m not sure if they would ever do so willingly.

Previously, related:

Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146987 - August 2020 (1454 comments)

This is just the start of another long saga of Apple obstructing app updates as much as they think they can get away with. It's a long way from "resolved" even outside of appeals.

I agree, I was merely speaking in the context of this specific removal.

"If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps."[1] Luckily the courts are another matter. Thank you Tim Sweeney. Apple deserved this.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150528064508/https://developer...

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44003590

Gee, people were very convinced this would not, can not, should not happen. I suppose they never read the original decision.

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