The One Clause Apple Lost

What the Ninth Circuit Left Standing

Epic Games lost almost everything in Oakland. Judge Gonzalez Rogers' September 2021 ruling found no illegal monopoly, no antitrust liability under federal law, and no obligation on Apple to open its payment system. Nine of the ten claims failed. The one that did not was grounded not in federal antitrust law but in California's Unfair Competition Law: Apple's anti-steering rules, which prohibited developers from telling users inside an app that cheaper prices existed elsewhere, constituted an unfair business practice.

The resulting injunction was narrow by design. It did not require Apple to allow third-party payment processors. It required Apple to allow developers to include a link — a single, external link — pointing users toward the developer's own website for purchases. Developers had been forbidden even from mentioning that such an option existed; the injunction said they could say so, and could link there. Apple appealed. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the injunction in April 2023, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb it.

The clause Apple lost was, in commercial terms, significant precisely because it was modest. Developers routing even a fraction of high-value subscriptions through their own payment pages could avoid Apple's commission — 30 percent on most transactions, 15 percent for qualifying small businesses and long-running subscriptions — on those sales entirely. For a company like Spotify, whose fight with Apple over exactly this dynamic had been running for years, the injunction represented a structural crack in the walled garden.

Why Contempt Followed in 2025

Apple's compliance, when it came, was designed to close that crack. The company introduced a new framework for external purchase links: developers could link out, but Apple imposed a 27 percent commission on any sale that resulted from a user tapping that link, even if the transaction was completed entirely on the developer's own server, outside Apple's systems. Apple also required a warning interstitial — a screen between the link tap and the external page, alerting users that they were leaving the App Store environment. Critics called it a link tax and a friction layer simultaneously.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers was not satisfied. In April 2025, she found Apple in contempt ↗, concluding that the company had wilfully violated the injunction by imposing financial and technical conditions that made the permitted links commercially inert. The contempt finding was accompanied by a referral to federal prosecutors for potential criminal contempt consideration — an escalation that went beyond the typical civil remedy and signalled the court's assessment of Apple's intent.

The contempt proceedings exposed a strategic calculation. Apple had four years between the district court's 2021 ruling and the 2025 contempt finding to construct a compliant regime. Instead, internal documents disclosed during the proceedings showed that the company evaluated the revenue impact of genuine compliance and structured its response to minimise it. The court's conclusion, in plain terms, was that Apple had implemented the letter of the injunction while defeating its purpose.

For developers, the episode illustrated how enforcement gaps can outlast the litigation that created them. Epic's legal victory on the anti-steering clause produced years of non-compliance before a court intervened again. The injunction that looked like the smallest win in the case turned out to require the most sustained judicial attention to enforce — and as of mid-2025, the question of what genuine compliance looks like remains, formally, before the court.