That immediately makes Apple’s flagship devices far less attractive to millions of people across the world - just ahead of Apple’s most prominent iPhone introduction in years.Īpple, on the verge of a $2 trillion valuation as its stock has soared in recent weeks, now faces a battle with one of its most lucrative partners over a crucial issue for antitrust regulators investigating the power of Big Tech.
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Upgrading: At its annual developer conference in June, Apple unveiled a range of new software features that expand the iPhone’s utility and add more opportunities for personalization.Įpic, a North Carolina company that is valued at roughly $17 billion and is partly owned by the Chinese internet giant Tencent, now appears poised to sacrifice millions of dollars in revenue in a fight that will keep Fortnite off iPhones.Union Effort: Apple employees at a Baltimore-area store voted to unionize, making it the first of the company’s 270-plus stores in the United States to do so.Here is what the change could mean for Apple. The End of a Partnership: Three years after Apple promised to continue working with Jony Ive, its former design leader, the two parties appear to be through.Sustained Growth: The tech giant reported a rise in sales of 2 percent for the three months that ended in June, though the company’s profits fell 10.6 percent.“We will make every effort to work with Epic to resolve these violations so they can return Fortnite to the App Store.” “Epic enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple, and they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines,” Apple said in a statement. Hours later, Apple responded, removing the Fortnite app from its App Store. The companies require that they handle all such app payments, so they can collect a 30 percent commission, a policy that has been at the center of antitrust complaints against the companies. Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, started encouraging Fortnite’s mobile-app users to pay it directly, rather than through Apple or Google. The fight began on Thursday morning with a clear provocation. Apple’s and Google’s spats with app developers over their cut of revenues exploded into a high-stakes clash on Thursday when the tech giants kicked the wildly popular game Fortnite out of their app stores and the game’s maker hit back with lawsuits.