Epic says Fortnite is coming back to iOS in Australia
Epic Games has announced that it’s bringing Fortnite back to iOS in Australia, after the country’s federal court ruled that Apple and Google’s app marketplaces are anticompetitive. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said on X that Fortnite will be made available on iPhones via the Epic Games Store “at a date to be determined,” while the company navigates the complexities of Australia’s antitrust ruling.
Epic sued Google in Australia in March 2021, after suing Apple in November 2020. A single court is handling both cases in parallel, even though they weren’t filed at the same time.
On Tuesday, federal judge Jonathan Beach found that Apple and Google misused their app marketplace dominance and in-app purchase commission fees of up to 30 percent to reduce competition, the Australian Financial Review reports. However, Beach rejected Epic’s claims that the tech giants had broken consumer law or engaged in “unconscionable conduct” — meaning particularly harsh, unfair, or oppressive behavior that goes against societal norms. We are still awaiting further details from Beach’s final judgment, which is more than 2,000 pages long and won’t be released publicly.
“We welcome the court’s rejection of Epic’s demands that we distribute app stores from within the Google Play store, and Epic’s attacks on other critical security protections that users rely on,” Google spokesperson Dan Jackson said in a statement to The Verge.
“However, we disagree with the court’s characterization of our billing policies and practices, as well as its findings regarding some of our historical partnerships, which were all shaped in a fiercely competitive mobile landscape on behalf of users and developers,” Jackson said. “We will review the full decision when we receive it and assess our next steps.”
In a statement to Australia’s ABC News, an unnamed Apple spokesperson said that the company welcomes the court’s rejection of some of Epic’s claims, but that it disagrees with other aspects of the ruling. “Apple faces fierce competition in every market where we operate,” the spokesperson said. “We continuously invest and innovate to make the App Store the safest place for users to get apps and a great business opportunity for developers in Australia and around the world.”
Epic originally sued Apple and Google in the United States on August 13th, 2020, in two separate cases which went before two separate judges, with dramatically different results in each case. Epic largely lost its fight against Apple after attempting to take the fight all the way to the US Supreme Court, but Apple may lose a large degree of control over its App Store anyhow because it failed to comply with the district court’s order.
After removing Fortnite from the App Store in 2020 amid its feud with Epic, Apple later brought the game back to its iPhone app marketplace in May. Fortnite also returned to iPhones in the EU last year, but only via the Epic Games Store for iOS.
Meanwhile in the US version of the Google trial, Epic has continually won: in late 2023, a jury unanimously decided that Google turned its Play Store and Play Billing system into an illegal monopoly, and a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just affirmed that decision at the end of July.
That decision could blow up Google’s control over its app store within weeks or months, unless Google gets the Ninth Circuit to grant a stay while it appeals to the US Supreme Court or grants a full en banc review of the three-judge panel’s decision. Google is arguing that the Apple decision should be relevant to the Google decision, but so far US courts disagree.