If the judge in the Epic Games v. Apple lawsuit decides to rule against the iPhone-maker, she may have already signaled the significant App Store change she would order to satisfy the game developer’s complaints.
The judge asked a question that shows she’s considering allowing developers to point customers to their own websites to make in-app purchases. Currently, these purchases must go through Apple’s payment system.
The App Store protected customers from more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2020, Apple said Tuesday. And the company’s App Review team rejected thousands of fraudulent applications.
The timing for this statement from the iPhone-maker isn’t accidental. In the ongoing Epic Games v. Apple lawsuit, the game developer argues that the App Store is a hinderance to innovation. Cupertino wants customers to hear its side of the story, too.
At the core of Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple is the assertion that the iPhone-maker has a monopoly. With testimony from an expert witness, the game developer has begun laying out its arguments to convince the judge why she should agree.
Essentially, it claims that switching from iPhone to another device is so difficult that Apple can treat its users as if they had no other options.
Legal action taken against Apple in the United Kingdom could see the company have to repay close to 20 million customers for allegedly overcharging them.
A landmark class-action lawsuit argues that Apple’s 30% commission on App Store purchases bilked customers out of more than $2 billion over a number of years. The plaintiffs want Apple to repay the money it supposedly owes.
The process for checking applications submitted to the App Store became the major focus of the Epic Games v. Apple court battle Friday. An important detail that came to light is that Apple employs 500 human experts checking submissions.
Epic Games used Friday’s trial testimony to bring to light fraudulent or inappropriate apps that slipped past Apple’s review team and onto the App Store. Fortunately, the problem is fixable: Put more people on the job. Double or triple the number.
In testimony on Thursday in the Epic Games v. Apple trial, Trystan Kosmynka, the senior director for the App Store review process, confirmed that around 5 million appications are submitted to the software store per year. And roughly 35% are rejected.
If 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s prickly AI, HAL 9000, picked up a sense of humor and then decided to make weather apps, the results would probably be a bit like Carrot Weather.
The sarcastic weather app has been a fixture on iOS for more than half a decade, and has not only gotten more hilariously abrasive during that time, but more useful as well. On Thursday, creator Brian Mueller unleashed the app’s latest update.
TikTok enjoyed another month atop the App Store in April, according to a new report from app analytics platform Sensor Tower.
It received a massive 59 million installs that month, across both iOS and Android. That’s ever so slightly up from March, when it racked up just over 58 million downloads.
The latest insider info brought to light by the Epic Games v. Apple trial is the lengths the Mac-maker went to convince Netflix to continue taking subscriptions in its iPhone/iPad app. But Netflix stopped anyway, and Apple took no action.
When Epic Games tried to do something similar, Apple banned all its software from the App Store.
Many people may be surprised to hear that while Tim Cook has often taken thinly-veiled shots at the targeted ad-supported business model of some rivals, Apple does itself sell targeted ads.
Although there is a bit more nuance to that, it can look like a contradiction, or even a bit of hypocrisy, from the outside. As emails highlighted during the current Apple vs. Epic legal battle shows, Apple employees also grappled with whether or not Apple should offer ads in the App Store — and whether this opposed Apple’s messaging.
