So Wednesday Epic Games did the thing everyone half-expected them to do eventually. They slipped a hotfix into Fortnite that let you buy V-Bucks straight from Epic, no Apple or Google tax attached, 20% off if you paid direct. Apple yanked Fortnite from the App Store within hours. Google followed not long after. Epic had the lawsuits against both of them ready to file basically the same afternoon, which tells you this was planned to the minute, not some spontaneous act of defiance. And then they dropped that video, "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite," riffing on Apple's own 1984 ad, the hammer-throwing woman and everything, except this time Epic casts itself as the rebel and Apple as Big Brother. I watched it twice in a row on my phone standing in the kitchen while my coffee went cold, and I'll admit it's a genuinely well-made piece of corporate trolling.
But here's the thing nobody in the Twitter pile-on seems to want to sit with: Epic is not doing this for me.
I've got a tiny weather widget app sitting in the App Store, been there about two years now. Maybe 400 people actually use it on a given month, mostly people who found it through a Reddit thread I posted once and forgot about. Apple's cut on my in-app tip jar is the same 30% Epic is suing over. Last quarter my payout was $61 and change, after the cut, after the currency conversion fee, after whatever else gets skimmed off before it lands in my bank account. Thats not a complaint about being poor, its a complaint about scale. A 30% fee on $61 is nothing. A 30% fee on the hundreds of millions Fortnite moves through in-app purchases is a completely different animal, and Epic knows that, which is exactly why they picked this fight now, with a game valuable enough that pulling it off two platforms simultaneously makes international news instead of a shrug.
The frustrating part is that this whole spectacle probably does nothing for developers like me. If anything it might make Apple dig in harder on the review guidelines out of spite, because now it's not a policy discussion anymore, its a legal war with a company that just publicly compared them to a dystopian surveillance state. Somewhere in a boardroom this week somebody at Apple is absolutely not thinking "you know, maybe we should ease up on small developers." They're thinking about depositions.
I don't even fully disagree with Apple charging something. Hosting a global storefront, doing app review (however inconsistent it actually is in practice), handling refunds and fraud and currency conversion across a hundred-plus countries — that costs real money and somebody has to eat it. Where it falls apart for me is that the fee doesn't flex at all with volume or with what the app actually is. My weather widget and Fortnite pay the exact same rate structurally, which is absurd on its face once you say it out loud. A grocery store doesn't charge you the same markup whether you're buying one apple or a truckload.
Anyway. I spent an unreasonable amount of time today reading the actual Epic v. Apple complaint PDF instead of doing literally anything productive, which is on me and not really Epic's fault. It's dense but honestly kind of a fun read if you're into that sort of thing, in the way a fight you're not personally in can be fun to watch from the bleachers. My kid starts remote first grade in about two weeks and I still haven't figured out where we're putting a second desk in this apartment, so maybe my priorities this week are a little scrambled.
Google pulling Fortnite feels almost like an afterthought in all this, and it shouldn't be — Android is supposedly the open one, the one where you can sideload whatever you want, and yet the practical experience for most people is barely different from iOS once you leave the Play Store. Nobody's making a slick parody ad about that part.
I don't know how this shakes out. Legal fights like this drag on for years, and by the time there's a ruling half the internet will have forgotten why it started. Going back to my weather widget now, which needs a bug fix for the radar layer that's been broken since the last iOS update and that I've been putting off for three weeks.