The price of Tim Sweeney’s long Epic fight, which Apple won’t let end
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Apple will again ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Epic App Store steering case.
- Epic battles Apple over developer steering to external payment platforms.
- Nearly six-year legal fight has generated untold attorneys’ fees and high stakes.
I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
Apple isn’t relenting. Even after a federal judge called for one of its executives to be investigated for criminal contempt. Even after nearly six years and untold attorneys’ fees. Even after a lost appeal and an initial Supreme Court rejection.
The iPhone maker and world’s third most valuable company says it will again ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its long-running case against Cary-based Epic Games over App Store policies — specifically whether app developers can “steer” customers to external mobile payment platforms that may charge lower fees.
On the heels of mass layoffs, Epic Games hopes Apple’s new arguments in an old case fall short. Here’s the legal backstory, which now somehow involves President Donald Trump.
In August 2020, Epic CEO and majority owner Tim Sweeney instigated antitrust fights with Apple and Google over their respective app stores, which levied up to 30% fees for in-app purchases and didn’t let developers link customers to potentially less pricey billing systems. Sweeney’s motivation was part financial; Epic Games makes Fortnite, which generates revenue by selling virtual currency (called V-bucks) for in-game purchases. Yet, Sweeney also talks (or types on X) a good deal about tech equity. Look no further than his quixotic visions for a metaverse. One senses Apple and Google were antitrust battles he had long wanted to wage, with Fortnite’s breakout success finally giving him the bankroll to do so.
The following year, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Apple must allow developers to link mobile customers to external payment systems. Her decision actually favored Apple overall (nine counts to one), but the Cupertino, California, company wasn’t ready to abandon the only count it lost — at least without a price. So after a failed appeal, Apple allowed steering to external billing platforms but charged big developers a 27% commission to do so, which negated possible cost savings. It also added screens which critics say were intended to discourage customers from leaving Apple’s system. Gonzalez Rogers was furious, stating in 2025 that the fee and screens violated her order and “strains credulity” as a remedy.
Soon after, Apple restored Fortnite to the App Store. “Apple’s 15-30% junk fees are now just as dead here in the United States of America as they are in Europe under the Digital Markets Act,” Sweeney posted on X. “Unlawful here, unlawful there.”
Fast-forward to last week and Apple told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California it plans to petition the Supreme Court to hear whether its 27% commission could have violated the “spirit” of Rogers’ ruling when that ruling never explicitly mentioned proper fee rates. Apple also wrote it would ask the highest court to weigh whether the lower court can issue an injunction that applies beyond the lone plaintiff. Basically, if Epic Games is the company that sued, why should a district court ruling apply to all App Store developers, including the likes of Spotify and Kindle?
To back this latter argument, Apple pointed to last year’s Trump v. CASA, Inc. decision, in which the Supreme Court (along ideological lines) found lower courts typically can’t set nationwide injunctions to block presidential executive actions.
On Monday, the Ninth Circuit ruled it would stay the case until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear it. Epic Games immediately challenged this stay. In its motion, Epic called Apple’s request a “delay” tactic that will allow it “to continue reaping supracompetitive profits” from in-app purchases.
There’s no guarantee the Supreme Court will hear the case; SCOTUS declined previous petitions from both Epic and Apple in early 2024. But Trump v. CASA didn’t exist then.
Apple stands to lose hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars if developers can steer customers to external billing systems. The case has cost Epic Games plenty too, something Sweeney noted in a staff memo last month announcing four-digit job cuts. “In being the industry’s vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers,” he wrote.
Yes, Epic Games stands to benefit from finally toppling the Apple and Google payment policies. North Carolina’s largest video game maker recently concluded its case against Google following a favorable jury verdict. Fortnite is back on more mobile phones as a result.
But if Sweeney also views these lawsuits as ideological missions, it’s worth noting that noble and fiscally responsible are different things. Confronting one of the most powerful companies in history sounds good, unless you’re reading about it in a layoff memo.
Triangle techies tackle OpenClaw
“Every month, an insane game-changing update happens,” said Christina Noel of Raleigh, who runs a marketing and customer relations consulting firm. A few months ago, it was Claude Code. A few months from now, it might be Mythos, a new AI platform that its creator Anthropic says is so powerful that only a few major companies can access it to shore up their cybersecurity.
One of the AI platforms of the moment is called OpenClaw, which is what drew Noel and many other tech-curious/tech-obsessed Triangle residents to a local coworking space for an event Thursday afternoon.
The best word to distinguish OpenClaw is autonomy. Through it, people give open-source AI agents access to certain applications (Gmail, Slack, LinkedIn) and train them to complete tasks with little human interaction. The agents are said to have “heartbeats” that enable continuous performance. It is less of a single platform like Claude or ChatGPT and more of a mechanism for working with other platforms to get things done. Sounds helpful. Sounds terrifying.
OpenClaw, which OpenAI acquired in February, can be used to automate personal or professional tasks, though the latter comes with more risk. Vitaliy Levit, the Triangle-based CEO of the travel tech platform Gondola, gave his agent “Dee Dee” a name, voice and blue-haired, blue-eyed female avatar. He refers to her as a her, not it. “The terrifying thing is the amount of disruption that this is going to cause for every business,” he told me over a video call last week. One simple task “Dee Dee” does is scour Facebook Marketplace for items Vitaliy is looking for.
On the enterprise front, Kai Kaapro of Raleigh told me he has a Claw agent organize internal communication channels for his company TourScale, a platform for recreational franchises like pedal pubs and tiki tours. “When a new franchisee gets onboarded, for instance, one thing it’ll do is decide what (Slack) channels it should be added to,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday. “That sounds pretty menial, but when you’re talking about a lot of people, that’s like a job somebody would have had.”
Kaapro, like many who attended this week’s Raleigh meetup event, noted OpenClaw’s limitations. It can be flawed. It isn’t accessible to a layman. And it wouldn’t be wise to have an agent autonomously run a mission-critical task at, say, a Fortune 500 company. But will it get there? “I don’t know where I fall on that scale,” he said. “But I do think it’s a glimpse of what makes AI so powerful.”
Clearing my cache
- North Carolina gives data center developers tax exemptions for buying equipment, electricity and computer software. Gov. Josh Stein, this week, questioned whether this 20-year incentive should remain.
- Things got political last Friday at Hitachi Energy’s incoming Cary facility as U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley made speeches touting Trump administration energy policies (while bashing Biden’s). Hitachi announced it will create 150 jobs at this site, which it aims to open in the fall to help supply data centers.
- Jobs promised: Charlotte, a.k.a. “Banktown,” landed another big financial provider as Japan’s SMBC Group said it will create 2,000 jobs (!) at a new U.S. hub. Obligatory note that the vast majority of the economic projects North Carolina backs with incentives never reach their initial hiring goals. But 2,000 is a big number, and Charlotte has a firm banking-services bedrock.
- Jobs gone: Pendo, a large analytics software provider in Raleigh, laid off about 10% of its workforce (around 90 employees) as the company embraces more AI tools.
- The federal government is expected to reauthorize the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs on April 14, sources of dollars that Triangle tech stakeholders say couldn’t come sooner. “We are hoping that agencies will act quickly to get their programs up and running, so that startups can access this funding,” Raleigh business consultant and SBIR funding advocate Eva Garland told me.
National tech happenings
- Artemis II is scheduled to splash down in Southern California this morning after its crew has traveled farther from Earth than any humans had before.
- Prediction platform Polymarket apologized for facilitating bets on the fate of the U.S. pilots recently downed in Iran. The site still accepts wagers on U.S. military actions in the Middle East.
- We might now know who the mysterious founder of Bitcoin is.
- Jury deliberations are beginning in the Ticketmaster/Live Nation antitrust trial, with possible verdicts demanding the company pay money or even split up. North Carolina is among the states to remain on the lawsuit after the Department of Justice reached a controversial settlement a few weeks ago.
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This story was originally published April 10, 2026 at 9:45 AM.
