Apple Seeks Supreme Court Review of Contempt Finding and Injunction Scope in Epic Games Case

Marcus Mendes, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Apple today filed a request with the Supreme Court in an attempt to reverse key lower court rulings over the App Store injunction in its long-running legal battle with Epic Games. [...] In its petition, Apple is asking the Supreme Court to review two questions.

The first is whether Apple should have been held in contempt for charging a commission on purchases made outside the App Store. The second is about the scope of the injunction.

On the first point, Apple argues that the original injunction did not specifically address commissions. Instead, it says the order only prevented Apple from blocking developers from including buttons, external links, or other calls to action directing users to external purchasing options.

According to Apple, that is not the same as saying the company could not charge a commission on those purchases. The Ninth Circuit acknowledged that the text of the injunction did not address commissions, but still upheld the contempt finding by relying on the idea that a party can violate the “spirit” of an injunction, even when the injunction does not specifically prohibit the conduct at issue.

Apple’s argument here is that only the letter of the law matters, and the letter of the injunction did not say anything about charging commissions on external payments, and thus they can’t be held in contempt for violating something that was never spelled out explicitly.

As for the second point, regarding scope, Apple argues that the injunction extends far beyond Epic itself, as it applies to all registered developers worldwide with apps on the U.S. App Store storefront. That includes developers that were never part of the Epic case, and, as Apple has pointed out before, even companies that compete with Epic.

Apple argues that this directly conflicts with the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which limited the ability of federal courts to issue broad injunctions that go beyond the parties actually involved in a case.

Apple’s argument here is that even if the Supreme Court upholds the contempt finding, the exemption from commissions should only apply to Epic, not to all developers in the U.S. App Store. I am definitely not a constitutional law scholar, but I think this would have been a long-shot argument pre-CASA. But post-CASA I think Apple might have something here, with this Court.

Apple’s full petition is not yet publicly available, but should be soon from the Supreme Court’s website. I’ve seen a copy, and Mendes’s summary jibes with my reading. In the meantime, here’s SCOTUSblog’s index page for Trump v. CASA, and here’s Mila Sohoni’s analysis of the CASA ruling.

★ Thursday, 21 May 2026