You got it wrong. Apple is the one who is not treating developers fairly. They never have.
But treating devs fairly does not make them a monopoly/anti-trust. They may have an almost abusive deal, but nothing's FORCING them to go to that market other than themselves. There's still the Android, PC, and Console Markets. Ergo, there's no monopoly, and the deal was there clear as day.
It's anti-competitive bullshit that no one has had the guts to sue Apple for, because pissing off Apple means losing access to all iOS users as customers.
Ooor they could just be on a different phone type and thus fans of the iOS would have less reason to BE an Apple customer and swap over to Android, etc. That's still a competitive market. There's nothing wrong with being on every console EXCEPT one. See: Nintendo, which usually IS the odd-man out when games are multi-platform.
I guess Epic is confident enough to fight this battle on behalf of everyone, probably because 1) Apple is already being investigated for anti-competitive behavior by congress and 2) Fortnite is so massively enormous that not even Apple would risk banning them from the app store for fear of losing customers.
Apple can live without fortnite. Fortnite/Epic can exist without Apple. This is just about greed on both ends. The issue however is "Apple's getting a share, and we want the whole pie despite agreeing to the share".
Don't get me wrong: Apple is NOT the only tech giant guilty of anti-competitive practices, not by a long shot.
But nothing about how they handle their store is, in itself, anti-competitive. People seem to forget that a 'market' does not limit itself to one's own phones. When this is taken to court, the argument will be taken, rightfully, that there are NON-APPLE PHONES ON THE MARKET.
Apple may be assholes who don't let you benefit from non-Apple approved content, yes, but in that respect the original NES could be considered a monopoly because it couldn't play ATARI games. Or the PS4 is a monopoly because it don't let you play XBox 1 Disks/games. But that isn't how it works. This is different software covering the same market - the Mobile market. Making it harder to enter their market isn't anti-trust, nor is it a monopoly. They do not force you to "Apple or Bust".
In any and all approaches legally, while it is SCUMMY, it is NOT illegal or monopolistic.
But it doesn't really matter which one gets sued; as long as one of them does, it will create a legal precedent for future lawsuits against the others. I dislike Epic for a lot of reasons, but this right here is going to buy them a lot of good will from me, and likely a lot of other people.
gamers should support epic games. They are trying to break the monopoly from the big publishers.
You realize Epic is underneath Tencent, which is literally attempting to form a monopoly of games by buying majority stockholdership of countless countries game development studios, or at least enough to have a major say in the control of the companies, right? Tencent is the literal monopoly, and Epic is one of their puppets that they own 40% of. If you honestly think that there isn't 11% of the remaining 60% (that's 18% of the remnants btw, not even a majority) who will agree with Tencent in MOST scenarios, then you don't know how stupid people can be.
I said it before: while neither are 'good', what Apple is doing is NOT AGAINST CURRENT LAW, and all aspects of current law clearly establish this.
When this is taken to court, they are not going to rewrite law to make people or even Epic feel better about their views. They are going to be enforcing the law based on the current written law, which is, as I've stated, a fairly OPEN-SHUT CASE in favor of Apple. The only way this goes in Epic's favor is a corrupt judge.
Laws need to be changed before anything Apple does (beyond their Right-To-Repair arguments) is strictly against the law (and even then, Right to Repair laws need to be rewritten slightly just because of how Apple handles their "Right to Repair" approaches.