I guess it's not clear cut if this comes down to whether or not vertical integration is beneficial to consumers in this case. The courts aren't going to decide

I guess it's not clear cut if this comes down to whether or not vertical integration is beneficial to consumers in this case. The courts aren't going to decide this case based on who is fighting for "the little guy" but whether the anti-competitive actions taken by Apple constitute a violation of civil or corporate law. > I'm honestly surprised so many HN readers are siding with Epic I'm not. If my only use case for an Apple device was to develop commercial software for Apple devices then I'd rather quit my job, go get a law degree and join Epic's legal team for no salary just to stick it to Apple. But I am a consumer that owns apple devices and I derive value from their model of the universe and don't see how Epic's alternative universe where they charge a lower fee with a different mechanism would improve anything, either as a developer or user. There are much more concrete things they could argue in court are harmful to consumers, like the fact that supporting MacOS and iOS targets costs enormous amounts of money compared to Windows and Linux due to the lack of (TOS compliant) solutions for targeting and testing for Apple's operating systems. But that wouldn't give Epic a win scenario that would allow them to bypass parental controls for microtransactions in a children's game.