TL;DR
The US Supreme Court agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of the contempt finding in its App Store fee battle with Epic Games.
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of the contempt finding in its long-running legal battle with Epic Games over App Store fees. The justices will review lower court decisions that found Apple willfully defied a 2021 order requiring it to let developers direct consumers to cheaper payment options outside the App Store. The case, Apple v Epic (No 25-1311), will be heard in the court’s next term beginning in October.
The dispute dates to 2020, when Epic sued Apple after its hit game Fortnite was removed from the App Store. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers largely sided with Apple on federal antitrust claims but found the company violated California law by preventing developers from steering users to alternative payment methods. She ordered Apple to allow those links, and the Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court upheld that requirement.
Apple complied by allowing external payment links but imposed a 27 percent commission on revenue generated through them within seven days of a user clicking. Epic argued the new fee effectively nullified the court order. Rogers agreed, finding Apple in contempt in April 2025 and ordering the company to stop charging any commission on purchases made through external links.
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The Ninth Circuit upheld the contempt finding in December 2025 but said barring Apple from collecting any commission at all went too far. The appeals court ruled that Apple may charge a fee based on costs “genuinely and reasonably necessary” for coordinating external-link purchases, and sent the case back to Rogers to determine what that rate should be. Apple has not collected commission on external-link payments for nearly a year.
The Supreme Court declined in May to pause the contempt order while Apple’s appeal was pending, with Justice Elena Kagan denying the emergency stay request without referring it to the full bench. That denial kept the financial pressure on Apple, which has argued the order forces it to forgo billions of dollars in commission revenue.
The justices will not consider Apple’s separate challenge to the scope of the original injunction, which applies to all developers worldwide rather than just Epic. The so-called universal injunction question had been a secondary issue in Apple’s petition.
The case is being watched closely because it could reshape how Apple manages App Store fees globally. Regulators in the EU, Brazil, India, and the UK have all challenged Apple’s control over iOS app distribution and payments, and a Supreme Court ruling on the commission question would set a precedent for those fights.
A ruling is expected by June 2027. The compliance dispute that began with a single Fortnite update in August 2020 is now entering its seventh year of litigation, with no resolution in sight on the central question of what Apple can charge developers who send users outside the App Store.
