The back-and-forth in the Apple vs Epic legal battle continues as the iPhone maker requested on Monday (Sep, 30) to throw out or narrow the decision concerning its App Store.
The request was made through a court filing to U.S. judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland and came on the day that Apple was required to submit internal documentation explaining what it had done since the ruling three years ago.
This whole case got started in 2020 when Epic challenged Apple’s up to 30 percent fees to developers for in-app purchases.
While the case was concluded in 2021 and Apple was ordered to allow developers to use other purchase mechanisms besides its own for in-app purchases, both companies are back in court after Epic challenged Apple’s compliance plan.
It was in yesterday’s filing where the technology giant said new decisions by California state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court in two unrelated cases bolster their legal arguments against the injunction.
In the filing, Apple says its practices were not unfair and requests that the Court relieve them from the judgment and vacate the injunction or narrow it so it only applies to Epic and not other developers.
Apple asked for a deadline extension four days before documents were required
The U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson says in a document from September 27 that Apple requested a fifteen-day extension of time to substantially complete its document production.
He writes that the Court denies the request which would have seen the documents being produced by October 31, 2024, if approved.
He also stated its practices were ‘bad behavior’: “Waiting until four days before the substantial completion deadline to announce its planned noncompliance and to disclose for the first time that the scope of document review was larger than previously represented is bad behavior.”
The deadline for document production was again stated as being Monday, September 30, with Hixson writing that “It’s up to Apple to figure out how to meet that deadline, but Monday is indeed the deadline.”
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