Apple’s latest attempt to stall the Epic Games App Store fee dispute has failed. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected the company’s request to pause proceedings on August 11 and ordered Apple to submit a fee proposal to the court within 24 hours, forcing a concrete next step in a case that has dragged on since 2020.
The ruling means Apple must now formally outline what it wants to charge developers for using alternative payment options and linking out to external purchase pages, something it has not been permitted to collect since April 2025. Once Apple submits that proposal, Epic Games will provide a legal analysis of it, and the court will determine what commission is reasonable.
Three Courts Have Now Denied Apple’s Pause Requests
Apple argued that the lower-court proceedings should be paused because the Supreme Court agreed to hear its appeal of the underlying contempt ruling, and a win at that level could potentially undo the entire fee determination. That logic has failed at three separate courts: the appeals court, the Supreme Court itself when Apple sought a pause there, and now the district court again. The fee proceedings move forward regardless of what happens at the Supreme Court level.
The contempt finding stems from Apple’s compliance with a 2021 injunction requiring the company to allow developers to link to external payment options inside their apps. Apple technically complied but charged 12 to 27 percent on link-out purchases instead of the original 15 to 30 percent App Store steering rules rate. When developers factored in payment processor fees on top of that, the financial benefit of the alternative was minimal, and few used it. Judge Gonzalez Rogers found in April 2025 that Apple had willfully defied the injunction’s intent and barred the company from collecting any fees on link-outs entirely. The Ninth Circuit later reversed the outright ban on any commission but upheld the contempt finding, sending the fee question back to the district court to resolve.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney responded publicly on X with pointed skepticism about what Apple’s proposal would contain:
“Will Apple honestly document their costs for human reviewer time and seek to recoup them? Or fabricate outlandish new notions of cost previously unknown to mankind? Tune in 24 hours from now to find out.”
Apple will need to justify whatever fee it proposes with a documented cost rationale, and the court will decide whether that rationale holds up. Apple’s previous fee structure drew the contempt finding because the company appeared to price link-outs punitively rather than to recover genuine costs, so the bar for credible justification is now considerably higher.
What gets decided here also carries weight well beyond the U.S. Apple itself told the Supreme Court that regulators around the world are watching this case closely, and any fee structure the district court approves could inform how the EU, UK, and other jurisdictions approach their own Apple’s EU App Store fees disputes. A fee level that a U.S. Federal court endorses as reasonable would be difficult for Apple to argue is unreasonable elsewhere.
