Apple just filed a certiorari petition with the Supreme Court, asking the justices to take up two questions arising from the company's contempt finding in its long-running legal fight with Epic Games. The petition, confirmed by 9to5Mac, marks Apple's third attempt to get the Court involved in this dispute. For the developers caught in the middle, the outcome determines whether App Store payment competition is real or cosmetic.
The timing matters. On May 6, Justice Elena Kagan denied Apple's emergency application to pause the contempt order, acting alone and without referring the request to the full Court. SCOTUSblog noted that she did so less than an hour after Epic's opposition was distributed to reporters, before Apple had even filed a reply. That speed suggested it was not a close call.
Apple's petition is now a separate procedural matter, but it arrives with the company having largely lost on contempt, though the Ninth Circuit reversed the blanket fee ban. The anti-steering compliance dispute, which is the only part of the original 2021 judgment Apple lost, is now in its fourth year of litigation.
How the fight reached this point
The dispute began in 2020, when Epic pushed a server-side update to Fortnite that bypassed Apple's in-app payment system after the app had already cleared App Review. Apple pulled Fortnite from the store. Epic sued.
Epic largely lost the antitrust case. The part Apple lost mattered, though: a 2021 injunction barred it from blocking developers from including buttons or links directing users to external payment options. Apple was required to allow the links.
It allowed them. Then it imposed a 27% commission on any purchase completed through an external link within seven days of a user clicking through. Its standard in-app rate is 30%. The three-point discount made external payment options functionally unattractive. Epic argued that the 27% commission flouted the injunction's purpose.
In April 2025, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed. She found Apple had "willfully" failed to comply, extended her order to bar Apple from collecting any fees on external-link purchases, and referred the matter to federal prosecutors over alleged false testimony by Apple executives during compliance proceedings. There is no public update on whether prosecutors have acted.
The Ninth Circuit upheld the contempt finding last December but reversed the blanket fee ban, sending the case back to Judge Gonzalez Rogers to determine what rate Apple may lawfully charge. The full appeals court then declined rehearing en banc on March 30, per Shinder Cantor Lerner. That remand proceeding, now underway in Oakland, is what Apple's cert petition is attempting to pause or reshape.
Apple's two questions for the Supreme Court in the Epic Games case
Apple frames the petition around two legal questions it presents as matters of broad principle, not just its own conduct.
On contempt: The 2021 injunction barred Apple from blocking external-payment links. It said nothing about commissions on transactions that followed. The Ninth Circuit acknowledged the text was silent on that point but upheld contempt anyway, relying on the principle that a party can violate the "spirit" of an injunction even when the specific conduct isn't named in the order. Apple's position is that a court order must clearly and unambiguously prohibit specific conduct before contempt can attach. Can a company be held in contempt for doing something the order never said it couldn't do? Apple says no. Both lower courts said yes.
On injunction scope: Apple argues the injunction extends far beyond what the lawsuit justified, applying to all registered developers with apps on the U.S. App Store storefront, not just Epic. Apple contends this conflicts with the Supreme Court's 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA, which limited federal courts from issuing injunctive relief that extends beyond the parties in a case.
The Trump v. CASA argument is Apple's freshest angle. The Court's 2023 decision to pass on challenges to the original injunction's scope predates that ruling. Whether the analogy holds is genuinely contested. Shinder Cantor Lerner, writing as legal analysts rather than neutral observers, noted that the legal issues Apple seeks to raise "may be overstated." Platform-wide injunctions in antitrust disputes carry different structural logic than the immigration enforcement context in CASA, and no independent authority in the research record has confirmed the analogy will carry the day. This is Apple's strategic argument; it is not settled doctrine.
The Supreme Court previously declined to hear Apple's challenge to the injunction's scope in 2023, then passed on both Apple's and Epic's earlier appeals in 2024, per Shinder Cantor Lerner.
Reading the odds on certiorari
Apple is not coming to the Court from a position of momentum. The stay denial this month is the clearest signal available. Apple filed its emergency application on a Monday; Kagan denied it less than an hour after Epic's opposition reached reporters, before Apple's reply was submitted, and without sending the request to the full Court. SCOTUSblog reported that the speed suggested the outcome was not close.
A stay denial and a cert denial are procedurally distinct. Emergency stays require a showing of irreparable harm and likelihood of success on the merits, a higher bar than certiorari, which asks only whether a case presents questions worth the Court's attention. Apple can credibly argue that Kagan's ruling says little about the cert question. The counter-argument is simple: the Court has passed on this case twice before.
Apple told the Court in an earlier filing that "regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate Apple may charge on covered purchases in huge markets outside the United States," per Reuters via KELO. Whether that framing moves the justices is unknown.
Epic's position is that Apple's serial escalations are deliberate delay. In its opposition to the stay request, Epic argued that Apple's "willful contempt" had "successfully delayed the restoration of competition by more than two years, allowing it to reap billions of dollars in what the Ninth Circuit previously affirmed were supracompetitive fees," SCOTUSblog reported. Apple has said the Ninth Circuit decision affects how millions of app purchases are made, per Reuters via KELO.
The two sides have agreed to an expedited briefing schedule, which could allow the Court to decide on certiorari before the summer recess, potentially by late June or early July, according to 9to5Mac.
What each path forward means for developers
If the Court denies cert, the case returns to Judge Gonzalez Rogers to determine what commission Apple can lawfully charge on purchases made through external-link redirections. That ruling will itself be subject to appeal, meaning the question of whether external payments function as genuine competition could remain unsettled for years, The Next Web noted. Apple has not been charging commission on external-link payments for nearly a year as a result of the contempt order, per the same report.
If the Court grants cert, the implications extend past the App Store. A ruling that contempt requires explicit textual prohibition, or that injunctions must be confined to named parties, would give dominant platforms more room to maneuver when courts order them to open up. Anti-steering remedies and similar obligations would carry less practical weight. For developers, the difference between those two outcomes is not procedural abstraction; it is whether the external-payment option Apple allows is a real alternative or a nominal one that preserves its economics regardless, per 9to5Mac.
The 2021 injunction was meant to settle whether Apple had to allow genuine payment competition. Four years and three Supreme Court visits later, courts are still working out what that requires.
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