Apple’s salad days are over. The company sits on the precipice of reinvention, and may become even more inward-facing in response to a damning US court judgement that may yet see it face criminal charges for contempt of court. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has ruled that Apple wilfully violated a 2021 court injunction that required it to change some of its business practices in terms of permitting developers to offer customers ways to purchase digital products outside of Apple’s App Store. ‘Will not be tolerated’ The judge told the company to stop preventing developers from sharing external purchasing options and barred it from imposing commissions on transactions made outside its stores. “Apple’s continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated,” the judge wrote in her decision, finding Apple in contempt of court when Apple’s Vice President of Finance, Alex Roman, lied under oath.  Documents shared during the trial reveal “that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option,” Rogers wrote. She also noted that Apple CEO Tim Cook ignored Apple Fellow Phil Schiller’s advice that Apple should comply with the injunction, and permitted former CFO, Luca Maestri, to convince him not to do so. “Cook chose poorly,” said the judge. An Epic win This is just the latest instalment in the long-running dispute between Apple and a developer called Epic. The latter has been engaged in a multi-year, international campaign against Apple’s so called “Apple tax,” and the computer company appears to have failed to prevail, at least for now. Apple said in a statement it will appeal the judgement: “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order, and we will appeal.” But what’s gone wrong here is Apple’s alleged contempt of court. This is a very serious charge that means a criminal component to the case has now emerged. The judge referred the matter to the US Attorney for the Northern District of California who will consider pressing contempt charges, presumably against Roman and the company that employs him. Could this conceivably put Apple CEO Tim Cook in the dock? A global challenge It’s well-known by now that Apple has faced steady and unrelenting attacks against the business model that evolved around its App Store. The company has been subject to anti-trust litigation across the planet, and regulators seem to be settling on a position that will outlaw those practices — even in Apple’s key target market of India. Apple will not be able to prevent app developers from offering their software and services via external stores and will not be able to take a percentage of sales made via those stores. These victories might well please some developers for a while. But they will likely come at a cost to platform security and ease-of-use and could generate confusion as consumers find themselves drawn to multiple stores, not all of which will prove to be as heavily curated or as secure as Apple’s. For Apple, the consequences of the case could see billions wiped off its revenue as developers find sales outside of its store, and as it sees some of its App Store-related payments disappear. This will damage Apple’s services segment, and as that part of its business is important to keeping the company sailing in a difficult consumer hardware sales sea, it means the company will need to turn its ship. What will Apple do? Apple is not without resources. It still has its hardware, platform, and services, and may now choose to compete on more equal terms with external stores — though how that might be implemented is uncertain. In the short term, it seems most likely Apple will need to charge developers more for access to the developer resources it provides. One way the company might do this is to offer a “Pro” tier to developers who want to sell software or services via its own store or any store, or to charge fees for APIs that enable external services. It has to build those APIs, after all, which means they are a product it could conceivably try to profit from. (Whether this is permitted is unclear.) For now, the direction of travel is obvious: the company must now swiftly change course to safely traverse these turbulent, shark-infested seas. You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.