Apple Terminated Epic’s Developer Account

misk@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 403 points –
epicgames.com

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/10062367

Apple Terminated Epic’s Developer Account

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Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.

Epic breached the terms of its agreements with Apple and Google to kick off its lawsuits against them in 2020, and now that Sweeney is openly complaining about Apple's terms for third-party app stores Apple doesn't trust Epic not to breach those too. Seems reasonable.

Seems reasonable.

Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you've agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn't think they were very reasonable.

I honestly don't know why there are so many people around here willing to back apple on this kind of shit. Who cares if they had the right to do it? The inherent problem here is that they had that right, when they really shouldn't.

Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.

Epic has an entire legal department to read over agreements like that, and yet they deliberately breached the terms. That's hugely different from someone unknowingly breaching a TOS that they didn't read.

We really need all TOS to be enforced fully so we can start pushing back on onerous TOS.

Please clarify it to me because I read this debacle as Apple blackmailing developers HARD into not talking bad things about the company. I get they're evil and petty but I'm having a hard time to believe they're this childish and stupid, specially with the DMA knocking at their doors.

This isn't some random developer, it's a developer that has already breached a contract with Apple. It's reasonable for Apple to be wary of entering into another contract with them when the CEO is publicly complaining about the terms.

There's definitely a case to be made that Epic shouldn't need an Apple developer account to make their own app store, but Apple is well within its rights to deny them an account based on their history.

I can just see them responding to the EU like, "Yeah, we'll allow other people to build app stores for iOS. They just need a dev account that we won't approve. That's not us specifically blocking alternate app stores though."

"You did this just to start pushing for what's basically DMA so we think you'll violate us for the DMA again which is already under effect so we ban"?

How did they breach the contract?

Epic changed the mobile versions of Fortnite to add an option to pay for V-Bucks through their own system, which is against the terms of both Apple's app store and Google's. That got them kicked off of both app stores and then they sued Apple and Google.

Ahh, I didn't quite understand from goggling what exactly the problem was. What else would Epic do, though? I don't think they could have just sued for damages.