Apple must produce 1.3M documents by Monday, orders judge

“Before yesterday’s report, Apple never previewed to Epic Games or to the Court that the number of documents it would need to review exceeded its prior estimate by a substantial amount,” Judge Hixson said. “This information would have been apparent to Apple weeks ago. It is simply not believable that Apple learned of this information only in the two weeks following the last status report.”

In a status report to the court filed on September 26th, Apple asked for more time to produce the full amount of documents. The company told the court that it had discovered that complying with the search parameters ordered by the court had produced many more documents related to Apple’s decision-making process.

Judge Thomas S. Hixson is holding Apple to the original deadline of Monday, September 30th, 2024. Original Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers originally ordered Apple to produce the relevant documents on May 31st. Judge Hixson called Apple’s last-minute plea for more time “bad behavior.”

“This gives rise to several related concerns,” Hixson added. “First, Apple’s status reports weren’t any good … it’s up to Apple to figure out how to meet that deadline, but Monday is indeed the deadline,” Hixson said in reiterating his original deadline.

This is part of the long-running dispute between Epic and Apple that began when Epic deliberately bypassed the rules of the store at the time to offer a direct link to Epic for payment. Apple subsequently banned Epic from the App Store.

During the ongoing court battle, Apple responded to antitrust concerns from the European Union and has since changed its rules for the EU. It now allows third-party payment options in the EU version of the App Store if the developer of the app or service wishes to include that. Epic has already opened its own EU store.

Epic is continuing the case because it argues that Apple has not fully complied with Judge Rogers’ ruling in the US and other countries. Judge Hixson, in rejecting Apple’s request for more time, supposed that Apple has the capability of reviewing that many documents in the course of a weekend.

He inferred that Apple’s feet-dragging over producing the volume of documents requested is because fulfilling the request is “all downside for Apple.” In theory, the documents could show that Apple has deliberately not complied with all Judge Rogers’ directives.