[shadowgovt]

I think they decided to play legal chicken and hoped Apple would blink, and Apple did not. The play wasn't entirely unfounded.

A lot of current law around things like app stores is existing in the liminal space of "Are these restrictions legal? Nobody knows. Do you want to be the one who stakes all your company's money and your investors' money and your entire business model on finding out?"

Epic did the calculus and seemed to conclude they wanted to be the ones to take the hit (possibly because since they also own their own app store, the math was a little win-win: any lock-in the courts find Apple has applies to the way Epic runs their store also). It hasn't worked out the way they'd hoped (though the anti-steering decision was interesting and a little surprising).

[TillE]

Apple makes a ton of money from the App Store, of course they were always going to fight this to the end in court.

I think the most generous interpretation of this lawsuit is that it's a publicity stunt from Epic, not for consumers, but to pressure legislators.

[shadowgovt]

The blinking would have been because Apple does make a ton of money in the App Store. So it would have been cheaper for them, hypothetically, to pay off Epic to go away or to make some nonsense carve-out in their TOS that was hyper-focused on allowing Fortnite to work while excluding all other stores-in-stores than to risk the Courts would say "Hmmm..... Y'know..... The way you run your store looks... a lot like a monopoly. Maybe you can't run it like that anymore. In fact... Maybe you can't run it at all. Maybe no company that makes the hardware also gets to dictate the software that runs on that hardware exclusively. How about we give you, oh, six months to divest the App Store into a separate company and re-tool the iPhone OS to allow loading multiple stores?"

Perhaps not a likely scenario, but US law is highly path-dependent and at the end of the day, judges' interpretations of law and precedent are all that matters regarding the correctness of a court decision.