Apple faces a deadline to submit more than 1 million documents related to recent changes to the App Store.
On Friday, Judge Thomas S. Hixon rejected the company's attempt to extend that deadline, calling the request an “egregious act.” Therefore, Apple's deadline is still Monday, September 30th. “It's up to Apple how they meet the deadline, but Monday is certainly the deadline.”
This is just the latest chapter in an ongoing legal dispute between Apple and Fortnite maker Epic Games, which is battling Apple's App Store rules. Apple almost won in U.S. District Court, but the court ordered the company to relax App Store rules and give developers more freedom to collect payments and subscription fees without using Apple's in-app payment platform. I ordered him to do this.
For this reason, Apple rolled out changes to the App Store in January. But Apple still collects a (small) fee on these payments, and Epic is now challenging the company for what it calls “malicious” compliance.
In August, a judge ordered Apple to produce all documentation on how it decided on new App Store rules. But on Thursday, Apple said the company needed an additional two weeks to review what turned out to be “more than 1.3 million documents” because Epic's search terms returned more than twice as many documents as expected. said.
Mr. Hickson, who is in charge of the document discovery process, not only denied Apple's request for an extension, but also said, “Apple suddenly announced four days before the actual completion deadline that it would miss the deadline because of the documents. , it's too terrible,” he wrote. This count, which has been reliably known for weeks, gives little impression that Apple is acting responsibly. ”
Hickson also suggested that Apple had ample time to gather and review the documents. In fact, with “nearly unlimited resources,” he claimed, “we could probably review this many documents in a weekend.”