How Apple’s walled garden protects ICE

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Of all the strange, unintended consequences stemming from major lawsuits, I never thought that the Trump administration’s power to force Apple to remove ICE-tracking mobile apps from its stores could have been connected to a legal battle over Fortnite V-Bucks.

Yes, we are talking about the in-game digital currency that Fortnite players can use to buy taco hats and trending zoomer dance emotes for their avatars. Yes, they’re the ones you can purchase as gift cards at CVS for a 9-year-old’s emergency birthday gift. But at one point, they were the subject of two major lawsuits filed by developer Epic Games, a massive gaming company that has pulled in over $5 billion in yearly revenue since 2020, that sought to break Apple’s and Google’s ironclad control over what apps could be downloaded onto iPhones and Androids. Apple won its case, but it’s turned into a monkey’s paw-esque curse for the company. “By virtue of Apple getting what it wants,” Verge executive editor Jake Kastrenakes told me, “it now is in this unfortunate position in which the government can pressure it to do stuff that it does not want.”

Some background: In 2020, Epic Games began offering mobile Fortnite players the option to purchase deeply discounted V-Bucks directly from its store, bypassing the massive 30 percent cut that Apple and Google would earn if users made purchases through the App Store and Google Play, respectively. (At the time, Fortnite, at that point the most popular game in the world, had made $1 billion through mobile transactions alone.) The game was abruptly kicked off both platforms for breach of contract. But Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney had purposefully done this as the pretext for a lawsuit: Epic immediately sued both tech giants, claiming that they were engaging in anticompetitive behavior.

While a jury eventually found that the Android Play Store was an illegal monopoly and Apple was eventually forced to ease restrictions on how app users could pay for their purchases, Apple did chalk up a key win: the App Store remained the only way users could download apps onto their iPhones, boxing out third-party apps downloaded directly from the web. This is a good outcome for a market-dominating company that wants to control and monetize every aspect of an iPhone user’s experience. But this is bad for a market-dominating company that suddenly finds itself operating under quasi-fascist conditions during a Donald Trump presidency.

Weeks ago, Apple’s App Store abruptly removed ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to report the locations of ICE agents and raids in real time, without explanation. Trump administration officials immediately claimed responsibility. “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News Digital, claiming broadly that the app could have been used to commit acts of violence against ICE officers. Google immediately followed suit, preemptively pulling ICEBlock and similar app Red Dot from Google Play. (A spokesman told 404 Media that the DOJ had not reached out to them.)

By now, it seems repetitive to enumerate all the ways Donald Trump has threatened Big Tech during this presidency, and how much companies like Apple and Google stand to lose if they upset the administration. (What if, for instance, Trump decides that Apple is too woke and therefore no longer exempt from his 100 percent tariff on iPhone semiconductors?) But while these companies can throw all the gold statues they can afford at the president, ICEBlock’s removal from the App Store indicates that the Trump administration has a new leash to keep Apple in line — one that Apple inadvertently fashioned for itself.

“Apple has fought very, very, very hard to make sure that it is in this exact position,” Jake told me as part of an interview below the fold. “If the Epic lawsuit never happened, Apple would be in the exact same position. It’s just that at any point in time, Apple could have changed how it had worked, and the Epic lawsuit was perhaps the most recent moment where something could have been forced. You could have removed the leverage point on Apple.”

You can read all of The Verge’s previous coverage of Epic Games v. Apple here and Epic Games v. Google here. And before we get to Jake, here’s some other great stories:

“The government can just disappear this app if they want to”

Tina Nguyen: I think no one would connect a court case over who gets all of Fortnite’s V-Bucks revenue to how the Trump administration is getting Apple and Google to get rid of ICE-tracking apps. What is the line between these two things?


Jake Kastrenakes: I wouldn’t say that the Epic lawsuit enabled it, but this lawsuit could have prevented this issue.

Apple’s always had an iron grip over the App Store. They control everything that goes in and out. It has a super well-curated walled garden. And that’s great if you’re Apple and you want to make a ton of money. It’s really bad if you don’t want to be responsible for every single moderation issue. So when it comes to the ICEBlock app, there’s only one route to get that app onto the iPhone, and it’s through Apple’s walled garden.

To your point about Fortnite and the Epic lawsuit, Epic went all out in this lawsuit and tried to tear down the walls of the App Store, and they pitched this better world where, if you have an app and you want to put it on the iPhone, you can do that any number of ways. You have your own App Store, you can do it on the web. And they mostly lost that lawsuit. This is what Apple wanted. Apple wanted to maintain control, but it also means that they have to deal with the fallout and the consequences of it: when the government is pressuring them to have an app removed, there’s actually a whole lot of stakes to them.

Did either Google or Apple cite any violations from these ICE tracking apps?

Allegedly, they said it was endangering ICE officers. It’s interesting. ICEBlock is basically Waze but for ICE agents, and if this is dangerous, so is Waze tracking cops hiding out with a speed camera. I saw one developer of a similar ICE app, DeICER, that had their app removed. Apple claimed it was because the app discriminated against a protected class, which is to say that ICE agents are a protected class and therefore they get higher moderation considerations compared to any other random worker. The argument is that this app is making ICE agents less safe. But the people who make these apps would argue that the apps are designed to actually make things more safe for even more people.

These apps can’t be downloaded on Google Play or the Apple App Store. But they could exist on people’s phones. So why does it have to be downloaded from these app stores?

The iPhone, from the start, has been designed such that if an app’s not in the App Store, you can’t download it. The ways around that are very few and far between in the US, and for a general-purpose app, you have to get Apple’s approval. If you want to make a Flappy Bird clone, Apple needs to give it its stamp of approval. This creates enormous issues. Every single time a new type of app emerges, every single time there’s some sort of scandal, Apple has to go, Okay, do we want this in the App Store? What rules do we want to put around it if we want to make money off of it? For a while, there was this problem with NFTs and crypto, because technically, if you’re selling a digital asset in the App Store, Apple gets a 30 percent cut. And during the NFT boom, none of the NFT companies wanted to give a 30 percent cut to Apple. Every single time, Apple always has to make a decision about what it wants to do with the app, and very often, that leads to frustrations for developers and for users.

In this case, if you’re the developer, and you want to distribute ICEBlock, you have to ask Apple for approval. Otherwise, you can’t get on the phone. With Android, it is similar. There are ways around it; you can disable a setting on your phone that stops you from installing random apps. Epic and other developers have complained that it is an onerous process. Google certainly doesn’t want you downloading third-party apps, but there is an option. But just for the sake of discoverability, if you want a lot of people to download this app, are you really going to convince them to go to the ICEBlock website and then follow a, like, 15-step process on their phone to dig into the settings menu and enable this and that in order to install this thing? Are they really going to feel safe and secure doing that? Probably not.

So if Apple pulls your app from the App Store, you basically can’t get on the iPhone. But if Google kicks your app off of Google Play, is there a way to still put the app on an Android?

It comes with a lot of hassle, which is really the main thing. You have to go to the website, you’d have to hit install on this app file, you would have to download it to your phone, you have to install it on your phone. Then the install is going to pop up a prompt saying, Hey, you can’t install this, it’s from a random source. You have to change this in Settings if you want to. But you have to go into Settings, you have to find the toggle, you have to turn the toggle on, the toggle’s going to inform you, Are you sure you want to do this?

So yes, there is a way. But after Fortnite got pulled from the Google Play store, Epic went, Okay, cool, you can download the mobile app from our website. And I don’t have the numbers on hand, but not a lot of people downloaded it from their website, even though Fortnite is one of the most popular games in the world.

The courts ruled in favor of Apple in this lawsuit, but was there a legal avenue in this case that could have prevented something like ICEBlock’s deplatforming?

Epic threw everything at the wall. You could say it was purely a business decision, you could say this was idealistic on the part of Epic’s CEO, but the lawsuit was claiming that Apple had monopolized iPhone app distribution. They argued that mobile apps should be more like apps on a Mac or a PC, where there’s an App Store and you can get apps and games that way, but you can also just go to a website and download whatever you want, because it is your device and you can do whatever you want with it. Epic took a lot of swings in that lawsuit and asking the court to fully open up the iPhone was certainly the biggest of those swings, and the court disagreed with Epic on basically everything. Epic only won a very small sliver of what they were asking for in that lawsuit, and that sliver is somewhat meaningful, but it still gives Apple substantially all the control it wanted.

If the court had found Epic to be vastly more convincing, there’s a world where Apple had to allow apps to get installed on the iPhone that didn’t come through the App Store. But that wouldn’t necessarily have been easy, and we know that because the EU passed a law that mandates the exact same thing. There is an entirely different regime in Europe for how apps work on the iPhone. Apple is required to allow you to install apps from the web or from third-party app stores.

Apple has gone out of its way to make this as unappealing for developers as possible and as confusing for consumers as possible. The EU has been frustrated with them because of how troublesome they made it. But there is a way. There is an option.

That option would make these decisions less monumental. Okay, Apple doesn’t want the ICE tracking app on the App Store. If you can download it from the website, who cares? It doesn’t matter. Everyone can still get it if they want it, no problem. But in the current environment, where it is the one and only way, it gives the government an immense leverage point, because the government can just disappear this app if they want to. Whereas if it could be installed from a website or from another store, there’s just no possible way that they could go around to every single host in existence and try to shut it down.

And no one’s carrying their computer with them everywhere they go. The ICEBlock app does not work without it being on mobile.

It is very much designed for mobile. The point is to be able to pull it up and see if there are local ICE agents in the spur of the moment: I see some officers. I’m gonna report this. You’re not going to pull out your laptop while you’re walking to work.

Taylor Swift’s giant engagement ring has nothing on this: