How Apple lost control of the App Store in the Epic trial

“Cook chose poorly” is one of those phrases you’ll someday read in a history book about the tech industry. That’s just one of the memorable lines from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ stinging rebuke of Apple this week, in which she ruled that Apple needed to change the way it handled external payments, buttons, and links in apps. And it needed to do so now. Apple says it will appeal, but it has already changed the rules. The app economy might never be the same.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about what just happened and why it matters. After some very important party speaker updates, Nilay, David, and The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes walk through Apple’s years of closed-door meetings about app commissions, and the ways in which Gonzalez Rogers found she’d been misled throughout the process. (Nilay also takes a victory lap on the whole “buttons and links” thing.) We talk about how developers are responding to the news, as well as what new things you might be able to buy in the App Store, which new apps might suddenly be possible, and whether Apple has any moves left in this case.

After that, it’s time for… more monopoly talk! Meta and Google are both still in court fighting to keep their companies intact. We’re learning a lot about how important TikTok has become, how Meta sees the world in general, and why it feared what might happen if Google bought WhatsApp. Meanwhile, just down the hall in the DC District courthouse, Google CEO Sundar Pichai made an impassioned case that this trial could be the end of Google Search.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Apple:

And in the Google and Meta trials:

And in the lightning round: