[justadudeama]

I think epic braking the rules makes their case much stronger. If they say "Apple's rules are unfair" they have a much stronger case if they can show damages caused by Apple's unfairness. My guess this is just another example of them showing the courts that Apple cost them $X in lost revenue because they could no longer make any money on macOS.

The update was live for a couple hours, and I am sure a lot of people purchased the cheaper (against the rules) option. They now have an exact number to tell the courts how much they are loosing to Apple, instead of a hypothetical situation where Apple could argue that customers love apple pay and would use apple pay over 3rd party payment systems.

[dev_tty01]

Let's think about it a different way. Suppose a vendor has a deal with Bloomingdale's to create a small boutique within the store and sell products. The deal states that the vendor use the store's payment system and give them 30% of revenue. That is not an unusual setup. With Apple, the 30% is the first year, 15% after that.

Now suppose the vendor decides to start using their own payment system and give Bloomingdale's no share of the revenue. This is of course counter to the signed contract. Bloomingdale's takes the step that is already spelled out in the contract they both agreed to. First, they issue a warning and ask the vendor to stop and return to the terms of the contract. The vendor refuses. Bloomingdale's now takes the next steps specified in the contract and removes the vendor's property from the store and ends their revenue from the store.

So now imagine that the vendor runs to the courts (and the public) and says Bloomingdale's damaged their business by not allowing them to sell in the store at no cost. They would be laughed out of the court room. This is what Epic has done. Using the "damage" caused by their own actions to justify their actions is a losing strategy.

Its actually a bit worse than my example because Epic wants to sell other vendor's goods through their store and make a cut of all of those sales. They basically don't want to follow the rules of Apple's app store so they can create their own app store. The hypocrisy is telling.

If Epic felt they had sound legal basis to question the Apple store rules (and existence) they would simply bring a lawsuit and try to effect change. They also could have simply entered into direct negotiations with Apple and made their case. They could lobby other vendors to join them. They could continue to follow the rules until the court's decide and no users would be impacted and their revenue would continue the entire time. They made other choices and so they have hurt their own business.

Personally, I think the app store royalties and policies need to be updated and made more appropriate to the scale of the business and the community. However, I also disagree with Epic's approach to the issue. You don't have to be an Apple acolyte to consider Epic's choices to be inappropriate.

[dev_tty01]

The damage that has been caused was created by Epic's breaking of the rules. If they had followed the contract they signed, their app would be in the store and earning money. They knowingly created this problem.

They "could no longer make any money" because of their own actions. Apple did not make them break the contract. I think we will see them lose big in the courts. Public opinion is a different matter of course.

[dwild]

> I think we will see them lose big in the courts.

Thus you think their fight has no merits and you pretty much explained why they did this.

If their case has merit, then the contract is null and void, thus no breach happened and they'll get back on the shop and everyone's win.

If they lose the case, then now the public, including law makers, has a better understanding of the impact of this kind of policies, which in the longer term may means some changes will happens around monopoly laws.