Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says 'the long national nightmare of the Apple tax' is over

• Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney celebrated his court victory against Apple this week.
• Sweeney was locked in a yearslong court battle with Apple over its App Store fees.
• Apple says it plans to appeal the decision but will comply with the court's order.

Tim Sweeney won, and he's out celebrating.

After a five-year battle with Apple, Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, won a massive victory in court last month. Apple must tear down its proverbial walled garden and allow for more competition and payment methods on its App Store. It will no longer be able to take a 27% fee from US developers who direct users to make purchases externally. And that means that Epic's popular game, Fortnite, is coming back to iOS.

"Apple's stay is denied by the 9th Circuit Court. The long national nightmare of the Apple tax is ended," Sweeney said on X on Wednesday. "May next week's WWDC be the Apple-led celebration of freedom that developers and users have long deserved."

In the comments, he added: "Apple is free to make money by fairly competing to offer services such as payments and ads to willing buyers."

Apple is hosting its annual Worldwide Developers Conference at its Apple Park campus next week, where it usually unveils new products and platforms. Last year, it unveiled Apple Intelligence, a new personal intelligence system that incorporates generative AI into writing tools, message summaries, and email suggestions.

It's not clear how the ruling will impact conference programming — Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Apple has said it will comply with the ruling, though it also plans to appeal the court order.

In a blog post on Thursday, Apple issued a defense of its global app emporium.

"The global App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2024," it said, noting that for 90% of the transactions it facilitated, developers did not pay any commission to Apple.

The App Store attracts over 813 million average weekly visitors worldwide, and spending across three categories — digital goods and services, physical goods and services, and in-app advertising — has more than doubled since 2019, according to Apple. Spending on in-app advertising, especially, has "helped keep many apps free or low-cost for users," the company said.

Sweeney, however, is looking forward to a new, more egalitarian era for the App Store, and anticipates two levels of change. The first, as he described to BI's Peter Kafka, will be that "all users are free to learn about better deals from all developers, and all developers are free to not just accept payments outside of the app on the web, but to tell users about those alternative ways to pay and to give consumers better deals. That's a key economic gain here."

The second is that "Apple would step up and compete, give developers a much better deal than 30%, and actually engage in competition," he said.