Judge is unimpressed by Apple’s deadline extension request in Epic Games dispute

Apple faces a looming deadline to produce what it says are more than 1 million documents related to recent App Store changes.

On Friday, Judge Thomas S. Hixson denied the company’s attempt to extend that deadline, describing the request as “bad behavior.” So Apple’s deadline is still Monday, September 30: “It’s up to Apple to figure out how to meet the deadline, but Monday is indeed the deadline.” 

This is just the latest chapter in the ongoing legal dispute between Apple and Fortnite-maker Epic Games, which has been fighting Apple’s App Store rules. While Apple was largely successful in U.S. district court, the court did order the company to loosen its App Store rules, giving developers more freedom to collect payments and subscription fees without using Apple’s in-app payment platform. 

This prompted Apple to roll out App Store changes in January. However, with Apple still collecting a (smaller) commission on those payments, Epic is now challenging the company over what it calls “bad-faith” compliance.

In August, a judge directed Apple to produce all documents related to how it decided on the new App Store rules. But on Thursday, Apple said Epic’s search terms surfaced more than twice as many documents as expected, so the company needed two more weeks to review what turned out to be “north of 1.3 million documents.”

Hixson — who’s in charge of the document discovery process — not only denied Apple’s request for an extension but also wrote that “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.”

Hixson also suggested that  Apple had plenty of time to collect and review the documents. Indeed, with its “nearly infinite resources,” he argued it “could probably review that many documents in a weekend.”