I would note that Apple and Samsung sue each others pants off over patents, but while their legal departments are fighting it out, the operations folks are making deals where Apple buys billions of components from Samsung for use in their phones. This despite the fact that those phones compete with Samsung’s phones. When two companies are engaged in mutually beneficial relationships, they seem to learn not to take the legal stuff personally.

s’all business

> Apple will never let them back on the AppStore.

Apple's statement today: "We hope that we can work together again in the future".

Also, Apple requested that Epic submit a new rule-compliant version of Fortnite.

I think Apple would be happy to have Epic back and paying 30%, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It won't break Apple if they don't get that money, but it's still nice money, with little work required from Apple.

>with little work required from Apple.

Outside of the billions of dollars and a decade spent developing and marketing a platform on which Fortnite can be consumed.

Sure, the platform takes a lot of money to create, but the marginal costs of adding or subtracting an individual developer in the App Store are almost nothing.

> We hope that we can work together again in the future

That doesn’t surprise me at all. Apple wants 30% of that sweet sweet pie.

I don't think this fight is 100% rational here. There is a good chance they will only lose money. It seems like Tim Sweeney is taking it personally, he is rich enough and has enough power at Epic to take the risk. As an indie game developer I can tell you that the AppStore is a pain and everyone would thank Epic if they manage to break or even change it, at this would lead to a large domino effect.

> I can tell you that the AppStore is a pain

In what sense is the App Store pain?

This well written article is a good starting point: https://medium.com/@mail_85203/being-an-ios-developer-must-b...

Epic’s endgame would be allowing consumers to install multiple stores on iPhones just like you can install multiple browsers on Windows.

Instead of thinking about this in terms of physical stores try to compare it to Netscape vs Internet Explorer.