John Ternus formally took charge as Apple’s chief executive on September 1, and one of the first public messages addressed to the new boss came from the man who has spent six years suing his company. Tim Sweeney, the Epic Games founder behind Fortnite, posted in the early hours of Tuesday that Apple was entering a new age, and that the eras in the company’s history have been read very differently by users, developers and shareholders.The timing was deliberate. Tim Cook spent his last day as CEO on August 31 sending a farewell memo to staff and stays on as executive chairman, handling policymakers and government relationships. Sweeney used the handover to make a direct pitch to the incoming CEO, an engineer who ran Apple’s hardware group and shipped the iPhone Air, the MacBook Neo and the hearing-aid AirPods before moving into the top job.
Sweeney wants Apple to grow the pie instead of taking a bigger slice of it
His longer post reads less like a legal position and more like an appeal to what Apple used to be. Here it is in full:“I hope Apple looks toward the future as optimistically as I do, seeing a blue ocean of opportunity to radically advance the hardware, the intelligence of the software, and the quality and spirit of the whole app ecosystem for everyone’s benefit. A company that looks to grow its business by bringing computing more meaningfully to everyone’s lives and by creating more value from its own efforts, rather than extracting ever more from a world on fire. I grew up in the era of the Apple of Woz, profoundly influenced by a computer empowering anyone to boot up, write programs, and share them with others. I believe that’s the ideal all developers should hold out for, and that the necessities of privacy and security are absolutely compatible with robust competition among stores, payments, and the other things. Let the best win.”
The Epic vs Apple fight started with a payment button inside Fortnite in 2020
Epic sued Apple and Google in August 2020 after adding a direct payment option to Fortnite, which got the game pulled from both app stores. Sweeney has said the legal bills in the Apple case alone crossed $100 million, and that Fortnite had earned roughly $300 million on iOS in its two years there. Counting lost players and the network effect of friends who could not join, he has put the total damage to Epic at a billion dollars or more.
Apple now wants settlement talks, and Epic is not in a hurry to take them
The fight is still live. In mid-August, Apple asked a federal court in California to push both sides into a supervised settlement conference, days after Epic turned down a direct approach. Apple simultaneously proposed a new fee structure for purchases made through outside payment links, ranging from 15 percent on standard apps down to 5 percent for small developers. Epic called those fees far outside the appeals court’s guidance and said it has about 60 days to file its opposition.Ternus inherits all of it, along with a September 9 event and a company worth about $4.6 trillion. Whether his Apple is a different Apple for developers will be settled in a courtroom, not in a memo.