By Jason Snell

May 1, 2025 8:27 AM PT

The hammer falls on Apple’s malicious-compliance scheme

U.S. District Court judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled largely in Apple’s favor in the Epic v. Apple lawsuit back in 2021, but she did find that Apple’s requirement that apps only use Apple’s payment methods and not link to external methods was fundamentally anticompetitive. So she ordered Apple to change its behavior. After two failed appeals, Apple was forced to follow her orders.

In a judgment handed out on Wednesday, Gonzalez Rogers said that Apple acted in contempt by failing to follow her orders and scheming to find ways to avoid them, that at least one executive lied under oath, and concluded that Apple has so brazenly botched the aftermath of her order that several of its longstanding App Store policies are now entirely void.

It was a bad day in court for Apple. And a self-inflicted one. As Gonzalez Rogers writes in her finding:

Apple’s response to the Injunction strains credulity. After two sets of evidentiary hearings, the truth emerged. Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the Injunction’s goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up.

What the judge found back in 2021 was that Apple’s 30 percent cut of App Store in-app purchases was fundamentally uncompetitive, as was Apple’s rule that prevented app developers from pointing users to external purchase options on the web. She ordered that Apple change its behavior, but instead Apple did pretty much what we all imagined they had done: cook up a scheme that seemed to follow the order but made the result so unpalatable that developers would opt for the status quo instead.

Thanks to the power of the subpoena, Gonzalez Rogers has brought receipts. There’s a large document trail indicating that Apple reverse engineered a 27% commission for external transactions (including a lengthy post-referral royalty period) in order to make them no better than just using Apple’s own internal payment system. When a major app developer pointed out that the overhead of external payment systems was more than the commonly-cited 3% (meaning that the entire thing would be a net money loser), Apple celebrated the good news.

Apple also attempted to engineer the directive to allow external links in apps by creating new barriers and requirements that would similarly defang those orders. It created full-page “scare screens” (I referred to them as “This App May Kill You” screens), demanded that all links be to static URLs (neutering their utility), and kept editing the warning labels to dissuade users as much as possible from ever agreeing to follow the link. (Cook is specifically credited with amping up the language in the warning screens.)

The company’s internal struggle is fascinating to read about. While Apple Fellow and longtime App Store overseer Phil Schiller doesn’t come across entirely smelling like a rose, he does end up looking far better than literally any other Apple employee in the ruling. Schiller “advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction”—imagine that!—while Tim Cook, CFO Luca Maestri, and the company’s finance team instead decided to concoct a strategy of malicious compliance that led to the poison pill of the 27% commission.

“Cook chose poorly,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote.

Not only did Apple attempt to find ways to circumvent the injunction, but it fatally hid their discussions from the judge. While Schiller gets credit from Gonzalez Rogers for sitting through the trial and reading the final decision¹, the judge suggests that his colleagues at Apple did not. Most troubling is the behavior of Apple’s Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, who the judge says “outright lied under oath” multiple times. She referred her ruling to the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco for possible criminal prosecution of Apple generally and Roman specifically.

“At every step Apple considered whether its actions would comply, and at every step Apple chose to maintain its anticompetitive revenue stream over compliance,” she wrote.

Because Apple has proven itself untrustworthy, the judge has decided that the time for talk is over. “This is an injunction, not a negotiation,” she wrote Wednesday. “There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order.” As a result, she has now enjoined Apple entirely from impeding the ability of developers to communicate with users or charging a commission for external transactions. In other words, Apple had its chance to comply, but since it refused to do so reasonably, it’s going to get hammered.

In the least surprising response possible, Apple says it will appeal. Maybe this time it’ll take things a bit more seriously.

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