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A federal judge has denied Apple’s request for more time to produce documents related to recent changes to the App Store, setting a deadline of Monday, September 30, despite the Cupertino giant’s claims of an unexpectedly large number documents.
Judge Thomas S. Hixson rejected Apple’s plea for a two-week extension, describing the company’s last-minute request as “bad behavior.” Apple now faces the challenge of reviewing and producing more than 1.3 million documents before Monday’s deadline.
The document production is part of the ongoing legal battle between Apple and Epic gamesstemming from a 2021 court order that required Apple to give developers more freedom in collecting payments outside the App Store ecosystem. Epic is now challenging Apple’s compliance with that order, claiming the required changes were made “in bad faith.”
Judge Hixson expressed skepticism about Apple’s sudden realization of the document count, stating that it was “simply not credible” that the company was only made aware of the problem in the past two weeks. He suggested that Apple, with its “nearly infinite resources,” could probably review the documents over a weekend if he were motivated to do so.
As the deadline approaches, all eyes are on Apple to see how it will approach this important document production task and what the content could reveal about the App Store’s decision-making process.
