Although the outcome of the lawsuit between Apple and Epic Games was more favorable to Apple than to Epic, the judge in charge of the case, Yvonne González Rogers, ordered Apple to allow the developers use other payment gateways, by adding a link from the applications.
The judge gave a deadline until December 9. Apple tried to delay that date, but the judge said no, that Apple must meet and must do so before the deadline set and allow developers to add buttons, external links to direct users to third party payment platforms.
Apple attorney Mark Perry told The Verge:
This will be the first time Apple will allow direct links in a digital content app. It will take months to resolve technical, financial, business and other issues.
It is extremely complicated. There must be guidelines to protect children, to protect developers, to protect consumers, to protect Apple. And they need to be written in guidelines that can be explained and applied.
Gary Bornstein, an attorney for Epic Games, says Apple’s request was to delay implementation of the judge’s decision for several years noting that “Apple does nothing unless it is forced to”.
Yvonne González, judge of the case, argued for the decision not to consider Apple’s request indicating that:
In summary, Apple’s motion is based on a selective reading of the findings of this Court and ignores all of the findings that supported the court order, namely nascent antitrust behavior, including the commission rates that result in extraordinarily high operating margins and have not been correlated with the value of your intellectual property.
This nascent antitrust behavior is the result, in part, of the anti-competitive policies Apple has pursued to harm competition. Therefore, the motion is fundamentally flawed.
Additionally, even if additional time was warranted to comply with the limited requirement, Apple did not request more than ten days to appeal this decision. Consequently, the Court does not consider the option of an additional period, other than the ten days requested.
In addition, it also states that Apple has not demonstrated that these changes represent a overt devastation
Consumers are quite used to linking an application to a web browser. Other than perhaps it took a long time to establish the guidelines, Apple provided no credible reason for the court to believe that the injunction would result in an injunction. overt devastation in the store.
Links can be tested by App Review. Users can open browsers and rewrite links with the same effect; it’s just a downside, that then it only works for Apple’s benefit.
Conclusion: Apple must allow developers add links to your own payment gateways from December 9. The first to update their apps are likely to be Spotify and Netflix, two of the companies that years ago eliminated the possibility of outsourcing their services through apps for iOS.
