I agree with @Daffrendo and @Allenheathx. That affirmation would be in the eyes of any judge, speculative, but they just gave ammo for Epic attorneys to say that the reviewing process just can’t do anything for the health of Apple Store, but it is nothing more than a way to guarantee the applications will indeed pay to them commissions when it is the case.
Yes to Allenheathx and NilsonLima. Another thought is that as Apple is itself claiming that it is subject to malware intrusions, this natively gives reason for developers to enact back-up and redundancy safety measures of their own, to ensure and facilitate ongoing operation of their app-to-customer interface (ie - an Epic Store component for Fortnite on iOS ensures customer service redundancy).
For what it’s worth, we immediately saw the writing on the wall, and started migrating our current project back to Unity, which in retrospect was 100% the right decision to make for this project, Epic/Apple battle aside. We’re now further ahead in Unity than we were in Unreal, and it was surprising how adaptable our code was. Some of our classes were just line-by-line adaptations to C# syntax. Some things were rewritten from scratch where the thinking in the engines was too different.
Basically, our reasoning was that this Apple/Epic battle won’t end for a long time. Even in the best case, there will be bad blood, and Epic and Apple won’t work together. The risk of Epic walking away from iOS/Mac is not zero the way we perceive it to be with Unity (they’re already compiling for Apple Silicon). Were that to happen, our entire investment would be lost, and we’d have to start over. We’re making the choice to start over now, to remove that risk.
We’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Apple in App Store fees, and we resent the fees as much as the next guy. But Epic’s case is weak, legally speaking. More, we deeply resent that Epic was willing take this risk on our behalf to possibly waste our entire investment. That’s unforgivable to us, like a pilot threatening to crash a plane and then saying “just kidding”. The fact that Epic went there just a little bit was a total dealbreaker for us. We find Epic irresponsible to their customers – us. Epic was willing to sacrifice our livelihoods for their cause. We can’t unsee that.
What else? We’re twice as productive in Unity. The API is much cleaner, and we have a ton of features in Unity that we were having to implement ourselves in Unreal (2D, Playables API in particular). And I personally like coding in C# much more. C++ has become OK, I guess. But it’s so verbose, and such a grammar-nazi. You almost can’t see the code for all the syntax.
We’re happy with our choice, and we’re also happy to have spent the time in Unreal, mostly to learn that the grass isn’t as green as we thought. And Unity has publicly committed to mending the biggest blunder they’ve made, the fragmentation of their URP and HDRP render pipelines. This was what forced us to move to Unreal in the first place.