App Store External Links Face Supreme Court Review Over Fee Rules

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of a contempt ruling that bars it from collecting fees on external payment links in the U.S. App Store. Apple called the court’s decision “welcome news” and said the case raises “an important question of law.” The court previously declined to weigh in on the dispute in 2024, so this reversal suggests the justices see something worth resolving.

The backstory matters here. Apple largely prevailed in the original Epic Games antitrust case in 2021, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers still ordered Apple to let developers link to outside payment options. Apple complied by charging 12 to 27 percent on those link-outs, compared to its standard 15 to 30 percent commission. The discount was thin enough that few developers bothered using the new system, which is what brought Epic back to court.

Gonzalez Rogers found Apple in contempt in April 2025, ruling it had willfully violated the injunction’s spirit rather than its explicit text. She banned Apple from collecting any fees on U.S. App Store links entirely. The Ninth Circuit upheld that finding, though it sent the fee question back to district court to set a more proportionate limit rather than a blanket zero.

Apple’s Broader Legal Argument

Apple’s core objection is that a contempt finding based on “spirit” rather than clear wording is a “recipe for abuse.” The company also leaned on a recent ruling, Trump v. CASA, to argue that lower courts cannot issue universal injunctions, and that any remedy should apply only to Epic, not every developer on the platform. The impact on developers broadly is exactly what Apple wants the court to reframe as a jurisdictional overreach.

Apple told the Supreme Court that the contempt ruling and the resulting order together “may reshape the global app marketplace,” a framing that gestures toward regulatory pressure already building elsewhere. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has separately proposed requiring Apple to allow payment steering outside the App Store, a parallel pressure point Apple is watching closely. The Supreme Court will hear the case when its new term opens in October, while district court proceedings on fee calculations continue in parallel.