Today is the fourth day of the Epic Games v. Apple legal battle, and documents shared in the trial continue to give us insight into the App Store and Apple's business practices.
App Store Vice President Matt Fischer is on the stand answering questions from Apple and Epic lawyers, and one of the emails shared as evidence confirms that Apple has established special deals with major app developers like Hulu.
In 2018, a tweet from developer David Barnard commented about App Store subscriptions being automatically cancelled through the StoreKit API, questioning why there hadn't been more offers to swap billing away from the App Store.
Matt Fischer asked Cindy Lin about it, and she explained that Hulu is a developer with special access to a subscription cancel/refund API.
Hulu is part of the set of whitelisted developers with access to subscription cancel/refund API. Back in 2015 they were using this to support instant upgrade using a 2 family setup, before we had subscription upgrade/downgrade capabilities built in.
Apple does not further detail who other developers with special access might have been in the correspondence, but these are not features that all developers have access to.
Apple has long said that the App Store provides a "level playing field" that treats all apps in the App Store the same with one set of rules for everybody and no special deals or special terms, but it's clear that some apps are indeed provided with special privileges.
Here’s are the documents where Apple employees talks about white-listing companies like Hulu for privelaged use of App Store APIs, like the cancel/refund API. pic.twitter.com/zG9FhI7aSe — Nick Statt (@nickstatt) May 6, 2021
Fischer was asked specifically whether Apple has given some developers special access to allow them to do things that other developers don't get to do, and Fischer said no, but he said that Apple sometimes wants to test a feature with a small group before providing it to all developers.
So now we know… “Hulu is part of the set of whitelisted developers with access to subscription cancel/refund API.” Sure hope Apple exposes that to the rest of us at some point. Google Play allows developers to trigger cancellations and it’s great for customer support. https://t.co/RxVGWRCJ4u — David Barnard (@drbarnard) May 6, 2021
Prior to when Epic Games implemented its own purchase options and kicked off this entire legal battle, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney asked Apple for a special deal that would allow it to bypass the in-app purchase system, which Apple denied. Just this week Sweeney also said that he would have accepted special terms from Apple for lower App Store commission.
