A look at the similarities and differences between Epic's lawsuits against Apple and Google from an antitrust law perspective
and its founder, @TimSweeneyEpic—as “our champion” vs. Apple so exciting is they have the cash and the will to see this through; fighting Apple is almost impossible for most of us, as you need money for lawyers and expert witnesses. https://www.wsj.com/... Nicolas Petit / @competitionprof : My provisional perspective? => a standard teaching of multisided market theory is that limitations to platform bypass are necessary, and plausibly socially efficient when platform seek to get all sides on board 3/n Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : When Apple launched the App Store, there were less than 10m iPhones on earth. When it closed down the payment rules in 2011 there were still only 150-175m iOS devices in use. Closer to 10x that today. Matt Stoller / @matthewstoller : The lawyer who created the Standard Oil Trust (S.C.T. Dodd) argued that the antitrust laws were designed to go after excessively low prices, not excessively high prices. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When Epic sued Apple and Google within days of each other in August 2020, FOSS Patents' comparison piece framed what was then an open question: whether the two cases were legally equivalent or whether Google's more open Android distribution model made Epic's claims weaker there. Florian Mueller and analyst Neil Cybart took up exactly that merits question in a follow-up Q&A on the lawsuits and App Store economics.
The arc since has run through Epic's formal antitrust arguments and its history of winning concessions from gaming giants like Sony [[a:965618]], through trial testimony where Sweeney admitted he would have accepted an exclusive App Store deal [[a:966051]], to internal Apple evidence — Phil Schiller's 2011 email floating a fee cut conditional on preserving $1B in annual App Store profits [[a:965930]] — that keeps the 30% rate itself on trial.
First-order effects
- Apple and Google must each defend their store economics in court simultaneously, with Apple facing the harder case on paper because iOS allows no alternative app distribution while Android sideloading gives Epic a counterargument Google will press.
- Epic is spending down the war chest that makes it, per the WSJ-sourced framing in the piece, one of the few developers able to afford lawyers and expert witnesses against Apple at all.
Second-order effects
- Every other large developer watches the outcome as pricing precedent: if courts accept that bypass restrictions are necessary for multisided platforms — Nicolas Petit's provisional view quoted in the piece — the 30% rate survives; if not, Apple's own internal deliberations like the Schiller email become ammunition that the fee was always negotiable.
- Stratechery's companion argument [[a:956913]] raises the reputational cost either way: each Apple decision favoring itself over developers invites scrutiny of its power regardless of who wins the litigation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, app store terms shift from private contracts to adjudicated and potentially regulated territory, with the multisided-market-theory debate Petit raised becoming the intellectual battleground for whether platform take rates are socially efficient or gatekeeper rent.
- The asymmetry between Apple's closed model and Google's open one could harden into a regulatory distinction, treating iOS distribution as a monopoly conduct question while Android's remains a contracting one.
The trend: App store gatekeeping is migrating from unilateral platform policy into antitrust adjudication, with Epic's twin suits as the test case for whether closed and open mobile ecosystems get judged by different legal standards.