Apple fires back at Epic

Apple is not backing down from the fight that started with Fortnite six years ago. On April 3, the company asked the Ninth Circuit to freeze its latest loss while it prepares a new appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. A Ninth Circuit order on April 6 granted that stay for 90 days, giving Apple time to file. (iclarified.com) That move matters because Apple is no longer arguing about the old question of whether it runs a monopoly. It mostly won that fight in 2021. The part that survived was narrower and more dangerous to Apple’s business. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple’s anti-steering rules violated California unfair competition law and ordered the company to let developers point users to payment options outside the App Store. (perkinscoie.com) Apple complied in form and rebelled in substance. It let developers add outside links, then attached a 27 percent commission to purchases made on the web after a user clicked through from an iPhone app. It also wrapped those links in warning screens and design limits that made them hard to use. Last April, Gonzalez Rogers said Apple had “willfully violated” her injunction, held the company in civil contempt, and barred it from charging any fee on those outside purchases. She also referred Apple and one senior executive to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt related to false testimony and document handling. (lit-antitrust.aoshearman.com) The appeals court partly rescued Apple and partly made the defeat harder to ignore. In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit agreed that Apple’s 27 percent charge was not a real alternative to App Store billing. The panel said the fee was large enough that no rational developer would use it, and it upheld the contempt finding. But it also said the district court had gone too far in banning any commission at all. It sent the case back down for a lower court to decide what fee, if any, Apple can charge based on actual costs. (perkinscoie.com) That is the point of Apple’s new Supreme Court push. The company wants the justices to review whether the lower courts can police its rules this aggressively, and it wants time to keep the current system in place while it asks. Apple already tried one Supreme Court run in this case and lost in January 2024, when the justices declined review of the broader 2021 judgment. This time the issue is smaller, but more directly tied to money. (cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov) While that legal fight was heating up again, a stranger App Store detail surfaced. Over the past week, some iPhone users noticed third-party apps showing update notes labeled “From Apple,” even though the apps were not made by Apple at all. Reports said the apps’ code did not appear to change, which suggests this was not an ordinary developer-issued update. Apple has not publicly explained what triggered the label. (macrumors.com) On its own, that glitch could be nothing more than sloppy metadata. Next to the Epic fight, it looks more revealing. Apple is being forced to expose more of the machinery it usually keeps hidden: how links are approved, how payments are tracked, how warnings are inserted, how updates are presented to users. The company’s instinct in both stories is the same. Keep control at the platform layer, even when a court is trying to pry it loose. And this week, that control showed up in the App Store under the words “From Apple.”