So the big Epic Games vs Apple trial kicked off yesterday in Oakland, opening statements and everything, no jury, just a judge (Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers) who's apparently going to spend the better part of a month listening to lawyers argue about whether the App Store is a monopoly. Every tech outlet on earth has a liveblog running so I'm not going to try to out-report The Verge here. What I keep getting stuck on instead is a much smaller number.
Back in January, Apple rolled out this thing called the App Store Small Business Program - if you make under a million bucks a year through the store, your cut drops from the usual 30% down to 15%. I signed up for it back when it opened, mostly on autopilot, because why wouldn't you. I've got a tiny utility app that's been limping along since like 2017, never made real money, brings in maybe enough for a nice dinner out every couple months. The 15% program is obviously a great deal for someone in my position. But watching Tim Sweeney get grilled on the stand about Fortnite's economics made me realize how weirdly disconnected my situation is from the actual fight.
Sweeney doesnt care about 15% vs 30%, not really - Epic makes real money and the argument is about whether Apple should get to set the number at all, or take a cut of transactions that dont even go through Apple's payment system. Thats a much bigger philosophical fight than "is 15% fair." My app, meanwhile, exists entirely because Apple built a store where I could put a $2.99 thing in front of people without having to build a website, a payment processor, a way to push updates, none of it myself. I complain about the cut sometimes (mostly to my wife, who has heard this rant approximately 40 times), but I also know I wouldnt have shipped that app at all in a world without an App Store to put it in.
That's the part I dont see a lot of the trial coverage grappling with, because it's not really what the case is about. The case is about Fortnite and in-app purchases and whether Epic gets to run its own payment system inside a $2 billion game. Nobody's suing on behalf of the guy with the flashlight app. But policy fights like this tend to get decided at the top and then trickle down, so I've got a weird stake in it even though nothing said in that courtroom yesterday had anything to do with me directly.
Also, unrelated, but: happy Star Wars Day I guess. May the 4th. My office chat at my day job has already had three different "may the 4th be with you" messages and it's not even lunch yet. I dont hate it exactly, I just think its funny that a pun from a 1977 movie has become an actual corporate marketing holiday that companies schedule product emails around now. Half my inbox this morning was Star Wars themed sale emails from stores I dont even remember signing up for.
Anyway, back to the trial - it's scheduled to run something like three weeks, and I genuinely dont know how it shakes out. Apple's whole defense seems to be "we built the platform, we take the risk, we get to set the rules," which is true as far as it goes but also exactly what every landlord says about every rent increase. Epic's defense is "we're a company that doesnt want to pay a toll," which is also true and also less sympathetic than Sweeney's lawyers probably want it to sound. I dont think either side is really the good guy here, and I say that as someone who has genuinely benefited from the system Apple built and also thinks 30% is a lot to hand over for basically being allowed onto a phone.
I'll probably keep half an eye on the trial updates over the next few weeks the way you keep half an eye on a legal drama that doesnt actually affect your life but is entertaining anyway. If nothing else its a good reminder that the App Store, which feels like just a fact of life at this point, was a specific set of business decisions somebody made, and those decisions are apparently still up for negotiation ten-plus years later.