Epic chief Tim Sweeney emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook about this in 2015

In the intervening decade, Apple has adjusted its take of App Store revenue in isolated areas, most notably cutting it to 15% on any apps from devs who have made under $1 million on the App Store, but the overall 70/30 split has remained unchanged. 'Once we are making over $1B a year in profit from the App Store,' he added, 'is that enough to think about a model where we ratchet down from 70/30 to 75/25 or even 80/20 if we can maintain a $1B a year run rate?' 'Do we think our 70/30 split will last forever? While I am a staunch supporter of the 70/30 split.I don't think that 70/30 will last.I think someday we will see enough challenge from another platform or web based solution to want to adjust our model,' Schiller wrote, appending a link to a Wall Street Journal article outlining how developers could sidestep the App Store fees. One of the documents made public as part of the pre-trial fact-finding process (and publicized by Bloomberg) is a 2011 email to Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue from App Store head honcho Phil Schiller suggesting that the company plan to reduce its 30% cut in order to remain competitive with other markets. To save you time, we've pulled together some of the juiciest insights below.

We'll have to wait and see who wins, but in the meantime we stand to learn a lot about each company's business, as Apple and Epic filed pre-trial fact findings in separate documents of more than 300 pages each.īoth documents are now publicly available online - you can read Epic’s here and Apple’s here. Apple responded by kicking Fortnite out of the App Store, and Epic's lawyers went to work putting together the lawsuit that's currently playing out.

Apple vs epic court case