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Apple's Supreme Court brief, in plain language
By UA Ledger staff — Archive date: 3 min read
Apple filed its opening merits brief in Apple v Epic and separately asked the court to vacate a contempt finding. What both filings actually argue.
Apple filed its opening merits brief with the Supreme Court on September 14 in Apple v Epic, case number 25-1311. Epic's response is due November 13, which sets the pace for the rest of the year: no ruling is coming before then, and likely not for some time after.
The Supreme Court filing, and a separate contempt motion
The next day, September 15, Apple separately asked the court to vacate the underlying contempt finding against it, arguing it never violated the text of the injunction it was found to have breached. That is a narrower, more technical argument than the headline case. The Ninth Circuit had already sent the case back to Judge Gonzalez Rogers in April specifically to determine what fees Apple can charge on external payment links, and Apple's position now is that the contempt ruling itself, the one that forced US link-out payments without commission, rested on a misreading of what the injunction actually required.
What this means in plain language
For UA and finance teams tracking the payments side of this case, the plain-language version is: nothing changes in the next few weeks. The current situation, US developers able to link out to external payment without Apple taking a commission, remains in force while the court process runs its full length into next year. Apple's petition covers a narrow procedural question about the contempt finding, not a wholesale reopening of the external-payment-link ruling, so even a win for Apple on the specific question asked would not automatically restore commission collection on those links.
The practical instruction is patience rather than contingency planning. Any product or pricing decision built around an assumption that this case resolves soon, in either direction, is building on a timeline the court has not offered.
The Epic case is also not the only fee fight Apple is managing this year. In August, Apple overhauled its EU App Store terms under the DMA, moving to a flat 5% Core Technology Commission for apps distributed outside the App Store, alongside a tiered 26%, 20% and 15% commission structure for standard listings, effective from October 1. Both changes are narrow, technical adjustments rather than a wholesale rewrite of how Apple charges developers, the same pattern showing up in the US contempt filing. Buyers running web shop or external-payment flows in both the EU and the US are managing two separate fee regimes on two separate timelines, and progress or a setback in one jurisdiction says nothing reliable about what happens in the other. Treating the two cases as a single storyline is the mistake most likely to produce a wrong assumption in a pricing model this quarter.
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