Bid To Prolong Apple Antitrust Suit Fails

Apple won a bid on Monday in California federal court for an early 2024 jury trial in an App Store antitrust case, as a judge declined to hold up the litigation while a US appeals court weighs a parallel lawsuit challenging the tech company’s policies as anticompetitive.

Lawyers for Apple at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and attorneys for rival app store Cydia at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan were at odds over how quickly to press ahead in the case. Plaintiff SaurikIT, which developed Cydia, alleged in 2020 the iPhone maker was violating competition law in the app distribution and payment processing markets.

Cydia’s attorneys said the litigation would benefit from hearing from the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in the blockbuster antitrust case Epic Games v Apple, which could be argued as soon as October. But US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who oversaw that case and ruled largely last year for Apple, said on Monday she wanted the case to move ahead faster.

“If something happens that changes the landscape, just come back and talk to me. I’m not going to sit here and wait. [Epic’s] case could go all the way to the Supreme Court,” Gonzalez Rogers said. “We’re going to litigate based upon the current state of the law.”

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