It has really been incredible to watch Apple’s greed and arrogance in their legal fight with Epic. I was dismayed that Apple won nearly all of the claims in their lawsuit because I’m a big proponent that consumers should be allowed to do what they wish with their own devices. I think consumers should be allowed to install alternative apps, including alternative app stores, without interference by platform owners. (And I think this should be true of all computing devices, including cell phones and game consoles.)

Unfortunately, that’s not the law in the US. So Apple won and consumers lost. But the one issue they did lose on was that In App Purchases having zero competition from Apple was deemed to be illegal tying. Basically, because Apple banned developers from even linking to alternative payment solution, they were illegally tying their market dominance in cellphones to another market (in app purchases).

Despite this loss, Apple won approval that monetizing in app purchases even outside of Apple’s system was permitted. All Apple had to do was allow developers to use their own payment system, and charge a fair and reasonable monetization fee for doing so. So the loss in this case for Apple was not nothing, but in the grand scheme of things, fairly minor. Apple had to open up the App Store a smidge, but they could easily still make significant sums of money by continuing to tax all digital purchases that happened on iPhones through apps, whether through IAP or through developers’ own payment systems.

They came up with a system so onerous it was designed never to be used. Malicious compliance to the nth degree. They came up with an onerous auditing requirement, and the fee they decided to charge was 27%. It was designed to ensure that developers would not be able to adopt it. It was designed to cement the illegal tying, but couched in a way that Apple hoped the court would bless.

Maybe the court would have had an Apple VP hadn’t been caught lying in testimony. Or maybe they would have gotten away with it if Apple hadn’t memorialized in writing a bunch of statements to the effect of, “Let’s make this as unappealing as possible.”

Perhaps if Apple had settled on a fee of 10%, or 15%, or maybe even 20% — they would have won full support. They could have shown that they were acting in Good Faith. Instead, they convinced themselves they were special, got greedy, and ended up committing perjury in the process. And now they aren’t going to get anything from a whole host of apps.

Apple won this case. But because they acted like idiots they turned almost total victory into a major loss. They got greedy, and I am loving seeing a Federal Judge put them in their place.