On a Thursday evening in August 2026, a legal document landed in a California court that managed to be both audacious and, in its own way, logically consistent: Apple, having been barred from collecting commissions on purchases made through external web links, asked a federal court for permission to collect commissions on purchases made through external web links. The company's proposed rates — 15 percent for standard apps, 10 percent for partners in its Video, News, and Mini Apps programmes, and 5 percent for small developers — would apply even when a customer leaves the App Store entirely and pays through a third-party website. The proposal arrives at a peculiar intersection of legal history. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California ruled in April 2025 that Apple had "willfully" defied her 2021 injunction, a finding that temporarily stripped the company of any right to a commission on external purchases.

A Ninth Circuit panel subsequently softened that position, allowing Apple to charge fees tied to what it called "necessary costs." Apple, in a move that stunned Epic, used that opening to argue for rates that look remarkably similar to the ones it charged before any court ever intervened. There is, buried in Apple's own filing, a sentence that its opponents seized upon immediately: the company acknowledged that its "necessary costs," as the Ninth Circuit defined the term, "would be essentially zero." Epic called the proposed rates "far outside of the bounds" of the court's guidance, and the Supreme Court has separately agreed to hear arguments about whether Apple's original defiance of the 2021 ruling was, in fact, wilful.