The Supreme Court takes Apple v Epic, narrowly
The Supreme Court Apple Epic cert grant covers only a procedural contempt question. The underlying anti-steering injunction is not up for review.
The Supreme Court agreed on June 30 to hear Apple's appeal in Epic v Apple, but the grant is a narrow one. It covers a procedural question about the 2025 contempt finding against Apple, not the underlying anti-steering injunction itself. Epic had already asked the Court to deny the petition entirely; the Court instead took a version of the case scoped well below what Apple originally sought review of.
That distinction matters more than the headline "Supreme Court takes Apple case" suggests. Apple drew a contempt finding last year over how it responded to the injunction requiring it to let US developers link out to external payment pages without paying Apple's commission on those transactions. The question now heading to the Court is whether Apple's conduct violated the injunction as written. Not whether the injunction itself was correct. A win for Apple on that narrow point would leave developers' right to link out intact; it would, at most, soften the consequences attached to how Apple implemented that right.
The Supreme Court's narrow grant: what it means for buyers
Nothing changes for US link-out campaigns today. Nothing changes before the Court rules either, which will not happen quickly, given that the case has only just reached the scheduling stage. Studios running web shop conversion flows off the back of the link-out ruling should keep building on the assumption that the right to link out survives this appeal, because that question is not what the Court agreed to review. The risk sitting in this case is narrower and more technical: how strictly a court can hold Apple to account for compliance mechanics, not whether Apple has to comply at all. Track it. Don't pause any web shop or D2C attribution work already under way.
The gap between this procedural grant and the broader platform-openness fight matters because other fronts keep moving whatever the Court eventually decides. Google notified developers on June 22 of a new US third-party app-store listing program, tied to the separate Epic v Google injunction, with a July 22 deadline to opt out. That is Android-side store-openness advancing on its own court-supervised schedule, unrelated to whatever timeline the Supreme Court sets for Apple's contempt question. A studio tracking both cases should not expect their outcomes, or their pace, to move in step just because they share a plaintiff.
