A federal court Monday ruled in favor of Apple in its appeals case against Epic Games in a fight over App Store fees, according to court documents.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with Apple in the antitrust-focused legal battle with Epic Games, the maker of the popular Fortnite video game.

The ruling reversed an earlier 2021 lower court decision that allowed North Carolina-based Epic to evade paying fees in the Apple-owned App Store.

Apple has charged developers up to 30% to use the App Store, providing access to millions of customers.

Apple appealed that ruling as soon as it was issued by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The company's CEO Tim Cook testified during the trial, as did Epic CEOP Tim Sweeney.

The court ruled Monday Apple did not violate antitrust laws when it banned other marketplaces from its iPhones.

"There is a lively and important debate about the role played in our economy and democracy by online transaction platforms with market power," Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. wrote in the court's majority opinion Monday.

"Our job as a federal Court of Appeals, however, is not to resolve that debate -- nor could we even attempt to do so. Instead, in this decision, we faithfully applied existing precedent to the facts as the parties developed them below."

Apple earned $78.1 billion worth of revenue from service charges through the App Store in the 2022 fiscal year.

"When Apple opened the iPhone to third-party app developers, it created a 'walled garden,' rather than an open ecosystem in which developers and users could transact freely without mediation from Apple," the court wrote Monday.

Ultimately the court disagreed with Epic's contention that Apple acted unlawfully in restricting app distribution to devices using the iOS operating system.

Epic first sued Apple when the California-based tech giant introduced its own payments system into Fortnite, resulting in the original multi-week trial in 2021.

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