Apple’s 30% tax on NFTs purchase is unlawful: Court Ruled

Last updated Apr 26, 2023

A California Court ruled against luxury mobile company Apple and confirmed that “Apple’s ban on outside payment methods” is illegal.

Apple is an American giant luxurious smartphone manufacturing company, that probably doesn’t require any introduction. In Apple’s App Store, all the apps required to use Apple’s in-app payment service & also there is a 30% commission system on every purchase.

To address Apple’s monopoly, Epic Games — the creator of the video game Fortnite- filed a suit in the court against Apple.

In this case, on 24 April 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Apple’s payment restriction on the apps is unlawful.

The court judge reached the outcome that Epic’s apps in the App Store are highly costly for the users, because of Apple, & this retards Epic to expand its reach to more users.

Tim Sweeney, the founder and chief executive of Epic Games, shared the whole legal story and confirmed that the court ruled against Apple’s anti-steering policy.

Fortunately, the court’s positive decision rejecting Apple’s anti-steering provisions frees iOS developers to send consumers to the web to do business with them directly there. We’re working on next steps.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) April 24, 2023

Crypto NFTs in the Apple ecosystem

In Q4 2022, Apple strictly ordered all the Crypto NFTs apps to restrict their every NFTs purchase via in-app purchase in Apple’s system otherwise Apple will ban all those apps.

Coinbase crypto wallet confirmed that their app was blocked by Apple because of the policy violation, so Coinbase removed the NFTs withdrawal feature.

You might have noticed you can’t send NFTs on Coinbase Wallet iOS anymore. This is because Apple blocked our last app release until we disabled the feature. 🧵

— Coinbase Wallet (@CoinbaseWallet) December 1, 2022

The Coinbase team tried to explain the challenges between Apple’s inbuilt payment system & crypto NFTs trades and also welcomed Apple to adopt crypto payment with existing policies of a 30% commission system.

We hope this is an oversight on Apple’s behalf and an inflection point for further conversations with the ecosystem. @apple – we’re here and want to help

— Coinbase Wallet (@CoinbaseWallet) December 1, 2022

Many crypto experts noted that the latest court ruling may bring huge benefits for the NFTs apps in Apple’s iOS store because it will allow NFTs to trade easily in Apple smartphones.

Here it will be interesting to see how Apple will counterattack this court ruling but if Apple will accept this court ruling as a final judgement then surely it will be a very big gift for the crypto NFTs sector.