Although the outcome of the trial between Apple and Epic Games was more favorable to Apple than to Epic, the judge in charge of the case, Yvonne González Rogers, ordered Apple to allow the developers make use of other payment gateways, adding a link from the applications.
The judge gave a deadline until December 9. Apple tried to delay that date, but the judge has said no, that Apple must comply with and must do so before the established deadline and allow developers to add buttons, external links to direct users to third-party payment platforms.
Apple attorney Mark Perry told The Verge that:
This will be the first time that Apple has allowed direct links in an application for digital content. It will take months to resolve engineering, financial, business and other problems.
It is extremely complicated. There have to be guidelines to protect children, to protect developers, to protect consumers, to protect Apple. And they have to be written in guidelines that can be explained and applied.
Gary Bornstein, an attorney for Epic Games, claims that Apple's request was intended to delay implementation of the judge's decision for several years noting that "Apple does nothing unless it is forced to."
Yvonne González, judge of the case, has argued the decision not to consider Apple's request stating that:
In summary, Apple's motion is based on a selective reading of this Court's findings and ignores all findings that supported the court order, namely incipient antitrust conduct, including commission rates that result in extraordinarily high operating margins. high and have not been correlated with the value of your intellectual property.
This incipient antitrust behavior is the result, in part, of the anti-competitive policies that Apple has applied to harm competition. Consequently, the motion is fundamentally flawed.
Furthermore, even if additional time was warranted to comply with the limited requirement, Apple did not request additional time more than ten days to appeal this ruling. Therefore, the Court does not consider the option of additional time, other than the ten days requested.
In addition, it also states that Apple has not demonstrated that these changes represent a manifest devastation in the App Store:
Consumers are quite used to linking from an app to a web browser. Other than perhaps needing time to establish the guidelines, Apple has not provided any credible reason for the Court to believe that the injunction would cause a manifest devastation in the shop.
Links can be tested by App Review. Users can open browsers and retype links with the same effect; it is simply an inconvenience, which then only works to the benefit of Apple.
Bottom line: Apple has to allow developers add links to your own payment gateways from December 9th. Probably, the first to update their applications will be Spotify and Netflix, two of the companies that years ago eliminated the possibility of contracting their services through the applications for iOS.