The judge steps in and says she’s confused by why Apple would require a separate app for every game. "I can use Netflix with a native app and I can see lots of different movies or TV shows or whatever. Is it that you didn’t want to use a subscription model?"

"No, we wanted to use the Netflix model,” Wright says, explaining Gamepass subscription to the judge.

“[Apple] allows Netflix to do what Netflix does, but it does not allow us to do what Netflix does. And it required making a separate application for every gaming title that has to be individually downloaded and put onto your phone.”

Wright just gave what I clock as the first mention of Apple Arcade —  basically the closest thing Apple has to a direct Xbox store competitor.

We just wrapped up Wright. We’re going over to Andrew Grant, engineering fellow at Epic Games.

Grant has worked on porting Fortnite to mobile, among other projects.

Grant is now having to spell out “metahuman creator” while listing Epic products. Court transcriber’s getting a lot of meta words in this trial https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22276265/epic-games-digital-human-creator-unreal-engine-realistic-human-faces

Grant continuing Sweeney’s line on Fortnite: “It’s a game, but it’s also an entertainment and social experience."

Grant is being asked if the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch have “a particular name.” In each case, he’s responding that it’s probably just the name of the device + “OS.” My impression is that Epic is positioning these devices as less computing-platform-y than iOS.

Judge asks what % of a game/app has to be rewritten to port it to a different OS. “It would really vary … it’s not unusual for applications like Slack to have entirely separate apps for different platforms.” Cites the need to adapt for different input systems, for instance.

Judge asks if there are platforms that are particularly difficult to port games to. “Linux has a reputation for being particularly difficult,” Grant says. (Thank god for WINE?)

Grant just went through the concept of an API, so lawyer could introduce StoreKit, Apple’s in-app purchase API.

Why is StoreKit required on iOS? “There’s no technical reason,” says Grant.

And with that, we’re stopping for a break. We’ll be back around 4:15 ET.

Starting up again after the break — talking about Unreal Engine.

Feel like I should note Magic Leap gets a very brief shoutout in court, listed among other platforms that Unreal Engine supports.

“Let’s talk for a moment about the process of writing an app.” What is human-readable code? Grant explains: code that a person can look at and deduce to some extent what’s going on. (i.e. “for” and “while” loops in programming). This then needs to be compiled to machine language.

We’re looping back around to APIs now — “hundreds to thousands” of them can get used while building apps.

Is there typically a cost associated with using an API? “No, there is not.” We just had a Supreme Court decision about this, in fact https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/5/22367851/google-oracle-supreme-court-ruling-java-android-api