Judge unimpressed by Apple’s plea for more time in the Epic case
At the end of last week, Apple tried – and failed – to get Judge Thomas S. Hixson, who oversees the document discovery process, to extend the deadline for submitting important documents in its legal clash with Epic Games.
This is just another chapter in the ongoing saga between Apple and Epic Games, which has been challenging Apple’s App Store rules. While Apple had a mostly favorable outcome in US district court, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presided over the Epic lawsuit, did order it to ease some App Store policies, giving developers more leeway to collect payments and subscriptions without having to go through Apple’s in-app payment system. This prompted Apple to roll out changes in January. However, since Apple is still taking a cut from those payments, Epic is now accusing the company of “bad-faith” compliance.
Back in August, the judge told Apple to hand over all documents related to its new App Store rules. But last week, Apple said Epic’s search terms turned up more than twice the expected number of records, so the company needed an extra two weeks to comb through what ended up being over 1.3 million files. However, Judge Thomas S. Hixson not only shot down Apple’s request for an extension but also speculated that the delay was an attempt to dodge exposing any negative information.
The way Apple announced out of the blue four days before the substantial completion deadline that it would not make that deadline because of a document count that it had surely been aware of for weeks hardly creates the impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.
– Judge Thomas S. Hixson, September 2024
Hixson pointed out that Apple had more than enough time to gather and review the documents. He even argued that with its “nearly infinite resources,” the company could probably get through all those documents in a single weekend.Now we’ll see if the tech giant really did manage to review and organize all those documents over the weekend. But one thing I’m pretty sure of is that this legal showdown between the two companies is far from over and will drag on for quite a while.