Apple and Epic face off at the Supreme Court over App Store commissions

The US Supreme Court agreed this week to hear the long-running legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, setting the stage for a final ruling on how much control Apple can exert over payments inside its App Store.

IT-NEWS, July 1 — Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the Supreme Court accepted Apple’s petition to review lower court rulings in the dispute over external link commissions. The central question: whether Apple violated a 2021 court order that required it to stop blocking developers from directing users to third-party payment systems.

The case dates back to 2020, when Epic Games sued Apple over antitrust violations. In the 2021 trial, Epic lost on nearly every count except one. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple could not prohibit developers from using in-app links to steer users toward alternative payment methods. Apple complied — sort of. It allowed developers to use a single plain-text link to external payment pages, but still charged a 12% to 27% commission on those transactions. Epic argued this was a transparent workaround and asked the court to hold Apple in contempt.

In April 2025, Judge Rogers agreed. She ruled that Apple had deliberately defied the spirit of her 2021 order and issued a new injunction barring Apple from collecting any commission on external link payments in the US App Store. Apple has not charged such fees since.

Apple appealed. In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a split decision: it upheld the contempt finding but also said Apple should be allowed to collect reasonable fees for its intellectual property. Unsatisfied, Apple took the case to the Supreme Court.

In a 34-page petition filed in May, Apple argued that the lower courts had based their contempt ruling on the “spirit” of the injunction rather than its text, a practice it said diverged from precedent in other circuits.

Epic Games welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case.

“We’re heading to the Supreme Court, where we will continue to fight Apple’s junk fees on third-party payments,” the company said in a statement. “The lower courts correctly determined Apple’s fees are illegal and anticompetitive, and we will continue to defend the free market.”

Apple responded with a brief statement of its own: “This is an important legal question, and we’re pleased the Supreme Court will hear our case.”

The dispute has become a test case for how Apple’s App Store model fits within US antitrust law. At stake is not just the 27% commission Apple charges on external link payments — or the zero percent it currently collects — but the broader principle of whether platform operators can dictate payment terms for transactions that happen partly off their infrastructure. A final ruling could reshape how app stores operate across the entire industry.