If you’ve ever bought a skin in Fortnite or paid for a subscription through an app on your phone, you’ve run into the fight at the center of this case, even if you never noticed it. Apple and Epic Games have been suing each other for six years, and now a narrower, weirder piece of that fight has landed at the Supreme Court.

Back in 2020, Epic (the company behind Fortnite) sued Apple, arguing that Apple’s App Store rules broke federal antitrust law and California’s Unfair Competition Law, a state law often called the UCL. Apple requires every app on an iPhone to go through the App Store, and it takes a cut, usually 30 percent, of purchases made inside apps using its in-app payment system.

Epic lost the big antitrust claim. A federal judge in California ruled in 2021 that Apple’s overall system wasn’t an illegal monopoly. But Epic won a smaller piece: the judge found that Apple’s “anti-steering” rule, which stopped developers from even mentioning that cheaper payment options existed outside the app, violated the UCL. The judge issued an injunction, a court order telling Apple what it could and couldn’t do going forward, requiring Apple to let developers include links and buttons directing users to purchase options elsewhere. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld that ruling in 2023, and the Supreme Court declined to hear either side’s appeal in January 2024. At that point, the case looked finished.

It wasn’t.

The day the injunction officially took effect, Apple rolled out a new policy. Developers could now link out to other payment options, technically satisfying the order. But Apple also started charging a 27 percent commission on anything purchased that way, on top of whatever a developer already paid a payment processor to handle the transaction. Apple also restricted how those links and buttons could look, where they could appear, and added a warning screen when users clicked them.

Epic argued this was a workaround designed to make linking out so unappealing that no developer would bother. Epic asked the court to enforce the injunction, and the case turned into a lengthy back-and-forth over whether Apple was technically complying with the injuction while defeating its purpose.

In April 2025, the district court agreed with Epic. It found Apple in civil contempt, meaning it ruled that Apple had disobeyed a court order, and imposed new restrictions, including a temporary ban on charging any commission on outside purchases. The judge also found that Apple executives had misrepresented, under oath, how the company arrived at the 27 percent number, and referred the matter for possible criminal investigation. The Ninth Circuit largely upheld that contempt finding in December 2025, though it sent the commission question back to the district court to work out a better number.

Apple asked the Supreme Court to review two things: the contempt finding itself, and a separate argument about whether the district court’s order improperly covered developers who were never part of the lawsuit. The Court agreed in June 2026 to hear the case, but only on the first question. The second one, for now, stays out of it.

That first question comes down to this: can a company be held in contempt for violating the “spirit” of a court order, even when the order’s actual text never mentions the specific thing it did? The Ninth Circuit said yes, saying that Apple’s commission had a “prohibitive effect” that undermined what the injunction was clearly trying to accomplish, even though the injunction’s wording never used the word “commission.” Several other federal appeals courts take a stricter approach, holding that contempt can only rest on conduct a court order clearly and unambiguously forbids, sometimes called the “four corners” rule, because you’re supposed to be able to find the violation within the four corners of the document itself.

Apple argues this is a real split among the circuits and that the Ninth Circuit’s looser standard denies companies fair notice of what’s actually prohibited before they can be punished for violating it. Epic argues there’s no split at all, that the Ninth Circuit found Apple’s fee violated the injunction’s plain text (not just its spirit), and that Apple is trying to get the Supreme Court to review a side comment in the opinion rather than its actual holding.

One older Supreme Court case keeps coming up on both sides: McComb v. Jacksonville Paper Co. (1949), where the Court held that a company can still be found in contempt even if the exact scheme it used to dodge a court order wasn’t specifically spelled out in that order, because otherwise a company could keep inventing new workarounds forever and the order would never mean anything. Apple says its situation is different because that case involved a specific labor statute; Epic says it’s exactly on point, since the injunction here was written in the same kind of general language.

This case affects the daily life of anyone who uses a smartphone, and especially anyone young enough to have grown up buying V-Bucks, game passes, or app subscriptions. The commission fight is really a fight over how much it costs developers, and eventually users, to buy digital stuff outside of Apple’s own payment system. Fortnite itself is caught in the middle of it, as well as every other app that might want to offer a cheaper way to pay.