Epic legal battle for Tim Cook as he defends Apple’s app store control
Apple chief executive Tim Cook described the company's ironclad control over its mobile app store as a way to keep things simple for customers while protecting them against security threats and privacy intrusions when he appeared in a courtroom yesterday.
He denied allegations that Apple has been running a monopoly.
Therareappearancebyoneof the world's best-known executives came during the closing phase of a three-week trial revolving around an antitrust case brought by Epic Games, maker of the popular video game Fortnite. Epic is trying to toppletheso-called"walledgarden" for iphone and ipad apps that welcomes users and developerswhilelockingoutcompetition.
Created by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs a year after the iphone's 2007 debut, the App Store has become a key revenue source for Apple, a moneymaking machine that helped power the company to a $57 billion (£42bn) profit in its last fiscal year.
Epic is trying to prove that the storereapsa15percentto30per cent commission from in-app transactions, but blocks apps from offering other payment alternatives.
Guided by friendly questioning from an Apple lawyer,
Cook's testimony often sounded like a commercial for the iphone and other products that he hailed as the best in the world.
The tone was not coincidental. Besides counting on Cook to help win the case against Epic, Apple viewed his closely watched courtroom appearanceasanopportunitytotellits story while the app store is also under scrutiny in the US and Europe.
"For us, the customer is everything," Cook explained while wearing a face shield, but no mask in an Oakland, California, courtroom that has limited access to a handful of people because of the pandemic.
That commitment includes ensuring technology remains "simple, not complex" for users of Apple products, Cook said, and protecting their privacy, whichhecalled"oneofthemost important issues of the century".
Cook is expected to face a muchmoredauntingchallenge later when he is questioned by Epic lawyer Gary Bornstein.
Apple fiercely defends the commissions as a fair way for app makers to help pay for innovations and security controls achieve those goals while also providing benefits for app developers, including Epic. Apple says it has invested more than $100b n in such features.
It also argues that App Store commissions mirror fees charged by major video game consoles – Sony's Playstation,
Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Switch – as well as a similar app store run by Google for more than three billion mobile Androiddevices.thatisroughly twice the number of active iphones, ipads and ipods that rely on Apple's store for apps.
The App Store ranks among Apple's biggest successes during Cook's reign. Since beginning with just 500 apps in 2008 the store has ballooned to 1.8 million apps, most of which are free.
Apple has drawn upon its commissions and exclusive inapp payment system to help more than double the annual revenue of its services division to $54bn last year.