New book examines global legal battles over Apple’s App Store rules

Apple’s App Store policies have been at the centre of lawsuits for more than a decade, and a new book aims to bring the biggest of these courtroom fights together in one account.

Titled iWAR: Fortnite, Musk, Spotify and the Siege of Apple, the book is written by Wall Street Journal business columnist Tim Higgins and is due later this month. It traces Apple’s journey from before the App Store to recent disputes involving Epic Games’ Fortnite and the Chinese app WeChat. Higgins positions Apple’s rise as the world’s most valuable company against the backdrop of lawmakers, regulators, and rival businesses challenging its dominance.

An excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal, “Inside Spotify’s Plot to Take Down Apple,” highlights one of the book’s core stories. It details how Spotify clashed with Apple over its subscription model and pricing rules. The conflict included a meeting between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Margrethe Vestager, who was then leading the European Commission’s antitrust office.

Spotify also launched a worldwide A/B test through its Android app, seeking data to demonstrate how Apple’s restrictions negatively impacted user adoption. According to the book, this data became a central part of Spotify’s legal argument. The European Commission later estimated that Apple’s policies led to Spotify losing around 20% of potential in-app subscription upgrades. Millions of users either abandoned the process before completing their subscription or had a poorer overall experience, according to the findings. Apple strongly disputed these claims.