Tim Cook's bad day in Epic vs Apple

In part 2 of this week's episode, Nilay talks with Adi Robertson about the judge's harsh questioning of Tim Cook on the last day of testimony in Epic vs Apple. Further reading: Apple said Roblox developers don’t make games, and now Roblox agrees Apple’s Phil Schiller gives Epic iPhone testimony At the Epic trial, Phil Schiller got away clean The level of Mac malware is not acceptable, says Apple’s Craig Federighi at Epic trial Apple wants users to trust iOS, but it doesn’t trust iOS users Tim Cook faces harsh questions about the App Store from judge in Fortnite trial Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?" and "What sectors are on the move right now?" Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?" and "What sectors are on the move right now?" Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of In App Purchases. This is a special part two. We did a whole episode earlier about Google I/O, about the Mac review, the iPad review. Part two, Addie Robertson's here. Hey, Addie.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Part two is all about the Apple versus Epic trial, or Epic versus Apple, I should say. I always say it backwards. It's Epic versus Apple. Epic's the plaintiff.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  Literally, the testimony portion of the trial wrapped up minutes ago from when you and I are talking. There is sort of fake version of closing arguments on Monday where both lawyers are just going to get asked questions by the judge, from what I understand.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Which is probably going to be way more fun than normal closing arguments.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Probably way more fun. Also, The term everyone is using for that closing argument is hot tubbing,

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  which is just very funny. Liz Lapata will be in the courtroom for the hot tubbing. But the actual testimony, all the witnesses on the stand, all the presentations of evidence wrapped up today. This week saw Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, Tim Cook on the stand. There's a lot to talk about there, but we should just start with what just happened because the absolute end of the testimony portion of the trial with Tim Cook on the stand was fireworks. Like, it just went sideways. It was like very boring for a week. Lots of experts that we are not even going to talk about because they were so boring. And then the judge kind of just lit into Tim Cook. What happened, Addy?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is going to be writing the opinion on the case and who occasionally interjects with some usually pretty interesting but very short questions. They more or less finished examining Tim Cook and then Judge Rogers just steps in with a question. And she's like, okay, well, it seems like most of the revenue in the App Store comes from games. So what's wrong with telling people that they can go and make in-app purchases elsewhere?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  And then that just kicks off this 10-minute-long discussion where she and Tim Cook have this, like, surprisingly testy exchange over whether it makes sense that once Apple put, like, once a developer puts something in the store, Apple brings enough value that it should get a cut of, like, whatever happens in that app forever.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And to me, this is kind of the central question at the heart of this trial is who is in control of your phone? And Apple's answer, kind of nakedly throughout, has been, we are in control of your phone. Right? So it doesn't matter if you download Fortnite or another app or whatever. Everything that happens inside that app, Apple wants a part of. It wants to, like, intermediate your relationship to those developers in a huge variety of ways, for a huge variety of reasons. But the most important one is if you buy something in an app, Apple wants its cut. And what struck me about this exchange is that

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  This is the whole trial and we've heard all of these reasons for Apple to be in the middle of you and an app developer, privacy, security, malware protection, app review, content review, naked bananas, the whole range of reasons that Apple should be in the middle. And when the judge went at Cook, he was just like, no, we got to monetize our IP. Like, straight up, he was like, this is how we make the money. And if we don't make the money this way, we'd have to figure out another way to make money. And there was no pretense. All the other stuff was out the window. Did that, did you hear that as clearly as I did? Because it, I was just, you know, if you've been listening to trial, it's kind of a drone, right? It's just like a low quality Zoom call in the background. I would like to commend you for being able to live tweet through it as attentively

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  as you have been, because it has been a drone. And this was like a jaw drop moment for me, that the judge came at Cook and Tim Cook's answer was, this is how we make the money. No pretense.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it was, because this had come right after a day where it was basically in like, I don't want to say inexplicably because I get it, but it was all about privacy in a completely tangential way. It was like, okay, well, what if someone doesn't want to do business with Apple because they deal with Chinese authorities and therefore you will have, they just like go on and on. And then there's, yeah, this sudden exchange and he's like, well, yeah, this is, we need to leverage our IP. And then Judge Rogers is like, well, it seems like gamers are subsidizing everybody else on the platform because they're spending all this money. And Tim Cook's like, yeah, well, this is the business model we picked.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, we wrote a story, Heim Gartenberg wrote a story for us in 2019. If you remember a few years ago, Apple made this big shift in how it presented itself to investors, that the future of its revenue growth was services. And that services revenue are going to be a big driver of Apple's growth. Because they had already sold as many iPhones as they could sell, right? There were no more, there were no more countries to unlock, there are no more expensive models to sell, like, the base of iPhones was out in the world, it's a huge number, hard to move the needle. They were going to monetize the phone more aggressively. And they're pretty open about this. Tim Cook said this on calls. When Heim dug into it in 2019, it was like pretty obvious that the biggest chunk of services revenue was the App Store. And the biggest chunk of that revenue was like Candy Crush whales.

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  Like people buying stuff in Candy Crush and in Fortnite and in other games was just the way that Apple was going to monetize. And that's a pretty, even just explaining it here, it's a pretty winding road, right? Like, you gotta get there. And it seemed like the judge clocked it instantly and was like, but this is pretty unfair. And she was like, at some point, she's like, the gamers are subsidizing Wells Fargo, which is like, almost a meme. Like, it's this close to a meme.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, Judge Rogers, gamers rise up.

• 7:15Nilay Patel?

  I just was not expecting her to go. There was it throughout this trial. So this is day 15 of this trial in the courtroom. It has seemed like Epic has done kind of a meandering bad job that Judge Rogers is kind of like, unimpressed. And she just like, came, just came out swinging right at the end.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, Epic is really, it seems like this whole week, their strategy is just, let's see if we can make Apple look like hypocrites. So like, they listed out, they just went to the App Store and searched for BDSM and just printed out pages and pages of like, search results and then made Phil Schiller like, read them. And so it's just all these things that are meant to show, okay, well, they're not actually holding up their standards. This privacy thing is a pretext. It's not like, you don't need the security. And then Judge Rogers just, yeah, actually asked about the substance of the competition law and like, the substance of like, what are people actually competing on when they're in the App Store? And what kind of services Apple actually selling?

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And one of the, again, and just in this exchange, literally, there was more action in this last 10 or 15 minutes. This may be the entire previous 15 days. Apple has repeatedly brought up this small business program where they lowered rates from 30% to 15% for developers to make less than a million dollars a year in revenue, is evidence of competition, evidence of them lowering rates. And the judge says, the issue with the small business program, from what I've seen, is it wasn't really the result of competition. That's a result of the pressure you're feeling from investigations, from lawsuits, not competition. And then there's a back and forth. And whom Cook says, after we did our 15, there was

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  competition, Google dropped theirs to 15%. And the judge just flat out says, I understand, perhaps when Google changed its price, that was competition, but your action wasn't the result of competition.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  And that is, I don't know, man, we could have like David Haney Hansen on the show. That's what he would say, right? Like the angriest developers in the ecosystem say exactly this, and the judge is repeating what we have heard for years now. I think what I just don't know is what that will lead to, right? Like, these were skeptical, harsh questions, but who knows?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  It's funny that the trial is kind of proceeding along to completely different, like there are two completely different fights that Apple's fighting. One is we shouldn't have to let people sideload apps, which they can like make, I think, a probably a pretty strong case for. And it's, it was a huge, giant uphill ask. So they've got this entire thread about, well, this is the protection that we bring. This is like, why our system is secure. And there is all of that, and that's flashy. And then there's this entire separate question of like in-app payments, and even, and things that are like even smaller than that, like steering, anti-steering rules, which the judge seems super interested in. That are really specifically about what happens when you've already installed an app and you're

• 10:13Speaker 02

  a regular user of that app, and how do you pay within that? And like, how do you see your payment options inside that?

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And those rules are, again, the sort of like side, we talked about this last week on the show, but the, the side switching here is like pretty fascinating that the law firm that Epic has retained, Krevath, just won a gigantic Supreme Court case about anti-steering rules for American Express, where they protected the anti-steering rules, where American Express was allowed to prohibit merchants from nudging people into other credit cards. And in this case, that same law firm is on Epic's side saying, you should let us nudge people into other payments, which is like deeply fascinating inside baseball. But I think the judge is looking at all of that. You know, one of

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  the big lines in the American Express opinion from the Supreme Court was, this market is hyper competitive. There are lots of credit cards. They're all fighting for you all the time. So these provisions are not unfair. It's hyper competitive. Here, the judge is like, oh, there's just no competition. There's another section here where she's like, I'm looking at evidence in the record that says, survey of developers, 39% of your developers are dissatisfied. How are you feeling any motivation to address their needs? And then she says, it doesn't seem like you feel any pressure or competition to change the manner that you act in to address the concerns of developers. And that's like, yeah, she just like clocked it. I don't think, Tim, I've not yet heard an Apple executive, I rare, you rarely hear

• 11:45Nilay Patel?

  an Apple executive on their back foot ever. But in this trial, they've all been very confident, very direct, in control. And I think Cook just seemed like on his back foot because he wasn't expecting this.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, I don't think, I think most people were not expecting it. It was really refreshing. Like, I'm really glad we got this.

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my theory with what Epic's, again, and I don't think Epic has done a good job here. They certainly haven't laid out a case that like, a normal person would understand. I think it's remarkable that the judge has clocked it on all this. But my sense is always when they know they're going to appeal this. If Epic wins, Apple is going to appeal. And then they're going to appeal again. And then they're going to appeal a third time to the Supreme Court. If Apple wins, Epic's going to do that same thing. Once you're on appeal, once you're out of the trial court into the appellate court, you cannot introduce new facts. So there's a part of me that says, oh, Epic is just trying to stuff as much information into the, the record of this case. So that they have it should some appellate court judge

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  three years from now be like, did anyone ever do a study and have developers are happy or not? And they just like have it. And that I think has led to like a very odd sort of mishmash of ideas here.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Judge Rogers also periodically makes note of the fact that like, there are a bunch of people watching this trial in public that they're, you know, she doesn't say this, but throw like YouTube rips of the feed like stream. That I think that there is also a question of how much of this stuff is just being played out sort of for public opinion and for regulators. And like, Judge Rogers has been made very clear, she is like, not particularly compelled, it seems, by all of the anecdotes that are brought up about whether developers are and or are not satisfied. But they are a thing that if you're just trying to get the word out about whether your company is good, they're a thing that you put out there.

• 13:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny that one of the recurring themes here is like, an Apple witness will get on stage and then Epic's lawyers will be like, Why aren't any developers standing up for you? And like, there's no way you can answer that question. And then today, in real time, Apple tried to enter Snap had its developer event yesterday. They're releasing a bunch of stuff in real time. Evan Spiegel was on CNBC and said, I'm happy to pay the 30% fee to Apple. And like, literally, they tried to show that story to Tim Cook like minutes after it was published. And they're like, you cannot do that.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, just, just wild. So that was Cook. And I would say, if not for that last 15 minutes of Cook, I my takeaway of this would have been Epic is gonna lose a trial. They know it, but we've got 10 years of appeals to come, right? Like, is that is that kind of where you were?

• 14:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. My take was more like, it seems like Judge Rogers is genuinely interested in the anti-steering stuff. My take would have been probably developers have to be able to put a link to their websites and apps.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Or at least tell people about the rules. This is like the John Gruber take is it is insane to impose rules on people that they are not allowed to talk about.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I was, I've kind of figured that that might come up no matter what. It has seemed pretty clear from the start that like, Apple's not gonna have to let third-party stores on iOS. And the arguments about payment processing, it's a little harder for me to parse. But yeah, this seemed more promising for them than I would have guessed.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  I my, I don't know. You never know. The judge is like, she's pushing the witness. She's got precedent to write to. She's constrained in a lot of ways. Judges also don't like being overturned. Who knows what she's gonna do? Who knows how she's gonna rule? But I could see her saying, you have to allow third-party payment processors. Right? We're not gonna do sideloading. We're not gonna do all this other stuff. But.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  You should give people a choice. And if your version is actually better, then they will pick it because that's competition. That seems like a very narrow ruling for her to make without wandering into sideloading and privacy issues and all this other stuff. Like you can just have another button. Maybe I'm being too optimistic.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  It is funny to me that she seems like she has complete disdain for this entire business of like microtransactions that she just keeps bringing up. Yeah, it seems like you just want to make impulse buys. That's bad.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like kids. You want kids to spend money that they don't have. That's that's your business. I think that's a fair response.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  It's entirely fair.

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  It's Apple's own TV show Mythic Quest has like a like a C plot about whether they should make a mobile game. And on Apple's own show, they're like, you're just trying to fleece middle aged women out of money on the potty. Like, that's Apple's own show's take on mobile games. We should actually write about that show. It is very subversive for Apple to make a show that hates the computer game industry as much as it does. So that's Cook. Let's bracket Cook. So that's what happened at the end. That's like the most interesting thing that's happened this week. We heard from Schiller. I feel like we can just get through Schiller's testimony pretty quick. He was great on the stand, very confident. He's Apple's marketing guy. You weren't gonna get him off message.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, he made Apple seem fun. He was like, I invented the click wheel.

• 17:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, there's not a lot to say. They tried. They tried to come at him a little bit with iMessage. They tried to come at Cook a little bit with iMessage. I thought we were gonna hear a lot about iMessage lock in in this trial, and we just did not.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really weird.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, there's just a part like, there's a lot of evidence in the world that, like, I don't know, teenagers want to have iPhones because if they have a green bubble, they get bullied. It seems like a thing you can say, like, you put in the record to say it's hard to switch from an iPhone, and Epic just didn't do it.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and to be clear, I don't mean that, like, I think that's a slam dunk, but I think it was way stronger and more interesting than a lot of the stuff Epic did end up actually bringing up.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm sure the judge has friends who are green bubbles. And she's like, what up? Get an iPhone. Like, it's a very relatable thing. But Epic didn't pursue it very much. But Schiller was good. Like, I think he, he just handled Epic's questioning very well. He's very, again, he's Apple's marketing guy, has been for a long time. Very smooth, very composed.

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• 19:23Nilay Patel?

  Craig Federighi, that testimony was also, to me, just like very revealing of how Apple thinks of its customers and what happens on the phone.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he was basically there to counter Epic's last expert witness, James Mickens, the like computer science guy, who was talking about why it's really reasonable, like that you should be able to open up the store, that all of the really important security occurs on device, that you have systems like code signing that you can deploy on the Mac, that you can also deploy on iOS. And then Craig Federighi gets up and he's like, no, that's completely dumb. That is not how any of this works.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, that all makes sense. And I, these are really hard problems. Like, it is good that Apple is in control of things on the phone. At the scale they're in control of them. Because if there is some rogue malware that hits every iPhone, Apple does have a kill switch and can turn it all off.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that Epic has like not made a super compelling case that the iPhone is not actually more secure than a lot of these other platforms. Like, that's just kind of the trade off that you make with an iPhone.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of conflicting evidence presented about the relative security of Android versus iPhone. There's been dueling studies. It's funny, we're talking just after we did our I/O. Episode, you know, Google stood up at I/O. And said, Android is more secure than anything. Samsung will tell you that Knox on an Android, Samsung Android phone is the most secure thing on any phone possible ever. Dueling studies. To me, it just seemed like it washed out.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it seems like, and they're also like, they're just kind of disagreeing about what counts as security. Like, that was Apple's big thing was that, well, if you just look at code or zero days or something like that, then malware, then maybe it's kind of a wash. But if you look at, it's really easy to get something like that's trying to scam you through a third party store that like, we're going to focus on social engineering. So yeah, a lot of it was complicated.

• 21:31Nilay Patel?

  And as I said, I don't think there's an answer there. Like, it is a complicated subject. Do you think the iPhone faces more state sponsored zero day attacks than Android? There is no way to know, but we also know that the answer is yes, it faces a lot of state sponsored zero day attacks. Are there more scam apps in one store versus another? Hard to tell, but there are a lot of scam apps. And all of these review processes are supposed to catch it and protect it. So a wash. But that, I think, brings, any fresh listener knows, like, the other comparison to make is to Windows and the Mac. And so Epic tried to come at Federighi about the Mac. And that was, to me, just, just wild,

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  the comparisons he was making and the analogies he was using.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Mac is like a car. It's You can drive it off-road, is what he'd said, and you have to be really carefully trained to use it. He did not say that you need a license, but apparently it's really like you need to be a specialist. You have to understand and you knew that you were getting into this thing. You were buying this metal death machine, the Mac. And the iPhone and the iPad, they're great because babies can use them, literally.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, literally, he says with iOS, we were able to create something where children, even infants can operate an iOS device and be safe in doing so. This is also complicated, right? One of the great things about iOS devices and Android devices sort of out of the box is that it's very hard to get malware and bad apps on them. And Federi even said, "We have trained iOS users to just download apps with abandon, because you can't do too much damage." Okay, on the flip side, it's like, what if you do think that you are capable of operating your Mac safely? Should I be able to operate my iPhone that way? Like, there's just like a big question in there.

• 23:29Nilay Patel?

  It's like, what if I don't want to be a baby?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's, well, on one hand, it is, okay, look, I, I have my phone and I have my computer. I have both these devices and they serve different purposes. And if I have a computer, I'm perfectly happy to like install software on the computer and use my phone as a lockdown, like little lockbox. The thing that's frustrating to me is that also, like, Apple and a lot of other companies see mobile as the future of computing. Like, they just see that as the future of what the computer is. And that's not really the future of, like, if you think of the iPhone as a supplementary device, then I understand where they're coming from. If you think of it as the future of computing, I don't know that I want that to be the future of computing.

• 24:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and again, this is part two of a roadcast. Dieter and I just spent, I don't know, six hours talking about his iPad Pro review. And this is what we talked about, that Apple sees the iPad Pro, which runs iPadOS, which is basically iOS, as the future, their future product. And even though they're like updating the Macs and they've got new chips, every time they talk about the iPad, you see them just burst with pride that they've invented the computer of the future. And it is as lockdown as an iOS device. And I just, I was just reading this quote from Federighi. Mac users expect a degree of flexibility that is useful to what they do. Some of them are software developers, some of them are pros running their unique tools and having that power is a part of it.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  This implies that software developers and pros running their own tools should not use iOS devices. And that is, has no correlation to how they talk about those products. And that, there's just a disconnect, I keep coming back to it. Apple really thinks that it is always in control of your phone. This computer that you have in your pocket all the time, kind of always belongs to Apple. And some people can pay, like, I hear this from our listeners, I get the emails, some people are paying Apple for that. But some people are paying Apple for a bunch of other stuff and getting that is part of the deal and with no way to turn it off. And I, I just think that's really strange.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  I also just, I don't know, it's weird if you try to extend, if you try to think, if every computing device in my life worked like the iPhone, that would feel completely bizarre. Like if I installed a piece of software on my Mac and then anything I bought within that software or anything I did with that software, having to go through some kind of centralized Apple system, that seems really weird to me. Like it doesn't necessarily, I kind of get microtransaction like costs on a phone that seems intuitive just because it's a thing that's happened so much. But if you extend it to other devices, it seems really strange and intrusive.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, this obviously comes straight to the Mac App Store and how Apple has that facility on the Mac. I will tell you, we've heard from a lot of developers over the years that they do not love the Mac App Store. There's just a lot of reasons to not use it, to not be in it. Chief among them are all the complaints we hear about iOS. They don't get to own their customer, they don't get to do updates, they don't get to do free trials, all this other stuff. But Federighi was like, The level of malware on the Mac, we don't find it acceptable. And if we use the Mac security model on the iPhone with all those devices, all that value, it would get run over to a degree dramatically worse than is already happening on the Mac. iOS has a dramatically higher bar for consumer protection. The Mac is not meeting that bar today.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  That is such a just dire evaluation of what the Mac is.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  I've been trying to not take all of this too seriously, just because this is the thing you say in a trial, like you have to be in a trial, you have to say trial things that make sense for your argument, like how we've had 50 different definitions of a game. And I'm probably pretty sure that if you asked Tim Sweeney, like in a bar, can you like describe your platonic ideal of a game? He'd probably say something different than what he says in trial.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  That's fair.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  But it's still, it's really grim.

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I have struggled to sort of balance it out as you're talking about, right? It's a trial and they're saying it, they're also under oath. There's a level of, are we evaluating this for the trial and they're just making the arguments, they're going to move on and they're, they're just mercenaries and they say the next thing they need to say? Or is this how they really feel? And I, to me, Tim Cook, when being pushed on why he has to lock down in-app purchases, saying, this is how we monetize our software development for the phone, that is as real as it gets. Right? There's none of this bluster about malware security. It was just, this is our business model and we're sticking to it. We think it's fair. And then all this stuff with Federighi about privacy and security, it's, that's all the distraction around it.

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  And I, I'm wondering how much the judge has bought the distraction versus like being centered, honed in on the business model question.

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• 29:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we've got a couple of minutes left. I want to end, we can't end without talking about further ridiculous definitions of what a game is, central to this trial. Walk me through what happened with Roblox. Because they, they like changed their whole website and they changed it back and like Schiller got to do a big smile, like what happened?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Okay, so Roblox is, I'm going to try to describe this in the broadest terms possible. It is a piece of software. And people can use like a language in which you write rules to make things that people can interact with. And they upload that to the central software and people can launch those pieces of user-created software from inside Roblox, the software. And then the people who create those user-generated experiences can sell things around that. And so you have game studios that can basically pay their employees by selling in-app purchases through these things. They typically call them games. Roblox is classed as a game in the store.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  And the, early in the trial, there was a lot of confusion about this because apparently around 2014, somebody actually like pointed out that, look, Roblox, it looks a lot like a store within a store. That you just, it's not even like Second Life, you go in and you wander around. It's like you get a list of things and you launch the thing and the thing launches and it's a game. And so they passed it to the review board. Apparently just nothing happened. It just kept going and it's very successful now. And so their, one of their App Store review executives was like, yeah, well, the thing is, the things inside Roblox, those aren't games. He also said Roblox itself wasn't a game, which is its own weird thing. But he's like, yeah, games have a beginning and an end and there's challenges in place.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  And then this was reiterated a couple of times. It's like, yeah, this is like a Minecraft map. It doesn't introduce new code. And then Roblox, which like, this isn't weird for it necessarily. It's been positioning itself as a metaverse. It's called these things experiences a long time, but it just went and like, control, like find and replace game with experience all over its website and like its apps. The games tab became the discover tab.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  The experiences, you creating a new game became creating a new experience. Instead of max players, you have max people. They just like wiped everything game related from their site. And then Phil Schiller came to the stand days after this had happened. And they're like, so Roblox, what do you think Roblox is? It's like, well, in my opinion, it's a game.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  And he like bugged.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I'm not in court, so I can't see this, but yes.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  But Liz was in the room and she was like a huge grin on Schiller's face when this happened.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  And then the distinction he said is that there's probably games inside it, but the games are not developed by developers. They created by creators. Because developers, they're making a thing. They're like coding an independent app that like goes on your phone. It could introduce malicious code. Apple has to review it. But these things, they're created. They are using a sort of sandbox that Roblox creates, like a scripted sandbox. And we know all the code that can run in Roblox. And therefore, if you're building this thing inside Roblox, we know that it's safe.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Which then raises a bunch more questions like, okay, then what's the problem with the Microsoft, like with X cloud, which is basically video. And then they have answers to those questions, but it gets complicated. But the point is, I kind of feel for Roblox. They have gotten, gone through a real roller coaster here.

• 33:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think one of your tweets was like, Apple is all over the map on the Roblox question. Like every Apple witness had a different answer. And then Roblox itself.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Mutually conflicting. Yeah.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's all over the place. And then Roblox itself is older than the App Store.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  Like it's.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  It's older than the iPhone.

• 33:20Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. I think my favorite part of all this is that your story was read. Was it read to Schiller?

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was brought up and then he read one paragraph of it.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  I mean, are just the fact that we're so intertwined in this, but like Addie's being too humble about it. Like they brought up her story in court and had Phil Schiller read a paragraph of Addie's word story about Roblox changing the word game to experience, which is just for talk about a metaverse. Like, we're just like in it. Like, we're just constantly just really strange. Okay, so on Monday, the judge is going to have the lawyers from both sides. She's going to hot tub them and ask both sides questions at once. That is the quote unquote closing argument. When are we expecting a decision?

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Before August 13th, probably.

• 34:12Nilay Patel?

  So August 12th at best.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Um, so we're gonna, they, they're gonna file final briefs next Friday, um, by next Friday. So it's definitely not before then. And then after that, there is, uh, I think jury selection for another trial in like early June. And then this opinion could be hundreds of pages long. There's a bunch of evidence to consider and but we're hopefully going to get it before mid-August.

• 34:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, it has been a long and strange three weeks. I cannot believe that you've live tweeted it all day, every day.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  One more day.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  There's one more day to go, but it has been, I don't know, it's just a very revealing trial. Like, I hear what you're saying, that sometimes you say what you need to say at trial, but Apple's attitude about what the phone is and their constant relationship to you. For example, I think Cook used the Best Buy analogy again today. Why would Apple ask Best Buy to publish a lower price for the phone in Best Buy? Yeah, I get it. The Best Buy would probably say no.

• 35:17Nilay Patel?

  But in Fortnite, makes no sense. Like, once you take the iPhone home, it is covered with ads for Apple services. Apple itself will be like, "It's time to buy a new phone. You can buy it directly from us on your phone." They are totally in control of that purchase experience and they want to extend it into every other app and extend that control into every other app. If this case taught me anything, if this trial taught me anything, it's that all the way up to Tim Cook, that is their belief, that third-party apps are just extensions of iOS, not other applications that run on top of the phone. I just, it's as Vergecast-y as it gets, right? I mean, that is a very narrow semantic debate, but it is, I thought it was super revealing. What's your big takeaway?

• 36:02Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that is kind of my takeaway. My takeaway is that it's weird to think about

• 36:09Speaker 02

  the web in all of this, that it's weird that everyone just points to the web constantly as the space where you can do anything. And this is like the final frontier of things that are not controlled by whatever company makes the system that you're running. They're like, "Oh, well, if you don't want to pay something, just go and do it through the web." It's the most that I think I've seen anyone talk about the web being useful for a long time, which is really weird.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  It would be amazing if the judge was like, "All right, I've read all the evidence, I've heard all the testimony. Apple has to allow secondary web browsing engines on the iPhone." Done and dusted, like walked away. I don't think that's going to happen, but it would be an incredible outcome. Okay, Addie, thank you so much. Thank you for listening. It was two hours of Vergecast this week, which is insane, but thank you all for listening and getting us through it. We'll be back next week with more. You can tweet at us. Addie is at TheDexterY. You should look at her Twitter. It is full of tweets from the trial. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. Next week, rock and roll.

• 37:24Speaker 04

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