Apple hit with class action suit from developers after App Store ruling

Apple may see further fallout over its failure to comply with a court order that led to last week’s contempt ruling. A class action suit filed on behalf of developers claims that Apple's actions cost Pure Sweat Basketball (and other developers) revenue during the period it was found to have violated the original court order. "Had Apple complied with the injunction, as required, Pure Sweat would have been able to sell subscriptions to its app directly to its customers," the law firm, Hagens Berman, alleges. 

The original 2021 court ruling forced Apple to allow App Store developers to direct user to other payments systems so that they could bypass the 30 percent of of in-app payments taken by Apple. The App Store was supposed to stop preventing developers from including buttons or links in their apps and metadata that would allow allow users to make purchases outside the App Store environment.

However, developer Epic Games accused Apple of "malicious compliance" with the ruling because it still charged a commission of up to 27 percent on any sales made through links to external payment systems. It also said Apple came up with onerous restrictions on external buttons, among other violations.

In her ruling last week, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said Apple "chose the most anticompetitive option" at every turn. She even alleged that Apple lied under oath to hide the truth about its actions and referred the case to a US attorney for a criminal contempt investigation. 

"The court ultimately held that Apple willfully violated the injunction to protect its revenues, and then ‘reverse engineered’ justifications to proffer to the court, often with ‘lies on the witness stand," the class action lawsuit states. "The evidence showed that while one senior Apple executive [Phil Schiller] ‘advocated that Apple comply with the injunction,’ Mr. Cook ignored this advice and allowed others in his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly."

The class action seeks to recover lost revenue for up to 100,000 or more developers forced to pay Apple commissions that shouldn't have existed. Hagens Berman obtained a $100 million settlement for iOS developers in a previous App Store class action suit. 

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