Photo Credit: Laurenz Heymann
Apple is facing renewed legal scrutiny after the law firm Hagens Berman filed a new class-action lawsuit over Apple’s violations of a federal injunction to reform the App Store. The new class action follows a recent ruling in which a judge found Apple in contempt of a 2021 anti-trust order that stems from the Epic Games case.
The 2021 injunction mandated that Apple must allow app developers to direct users to external websites for in-app purchases and subscriptions. That would allow developers to bypass Apple’s typical 15-30% commission fee. The court found that Apple implemented a series of measures intended to circumvent the order—effectively blocking developers from accessing alternative payment methods. They also imposed a 27% fee on payments outside the App Store.
“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 reads. “The evidence showed that while one senior Apple executive ‘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 lawsuit continues.
Hagens Berman alleges that Apple’s actions deprived developers of billions of potential revenue. The lawsuit claims Apple engaged in internal analyses to devise the best ways to sidestep the injunction. Only 34 out of 136,000 developers were able to implement third-party payment options—representing only 0.025% of eligible apps. That’s over the course of a 15-month injunction where app developers were supposed to be able to communicate with their user base about outside payments.
“Apple’s lip service concealed its real intentions from the start: to use every trick in the book to subvert the court’s order, in flagrant violation of the law,” Berman said. “This was not a victimless crime.”
The new class-action, led by Pure Sweat Basketball Inc. as the named plaintiff, seeks to recover lost revenues for potentially more than 100,00 developers who were forced to pay Apple commissions they should have been able to avoid. If successful, the lawsuit could result in substantial compensation for impacted developers. Hagens Berman previously obtained a $100 million settlement for iOS developers in a previous case concerning the App Store.
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