Federal law says you can jailbreak your phone or tablet and put whatever you want on it, and Apple cannot stop you from doing that.
The question is whether the law requires Apple to code their OS to make that easy for you. It’s up to the courts of course, but I’m skeptical there is a viable, consistent legal theory available to Epic under current law.
> Federal law says you can jailbreak your phone or tablet and put whatever you want on it, and Apple cannot stop you from doing that.
That's a strange one. In patching security holes, Apple are actively preventing people from jailbreaking their phones. And they should be. So that argument seems ... problematic. This kind of thing was never about making it easy to jailbreak your devices. Actually, it's kind of about the opposite: you should be able to own a device that runs code of your choosing and also have that device not be riddled with security vulnerabilities. (And, despite Apple's bizarre insistence to the contrary, this is very possible).
Correct, apple can either release a phone with perfect software with no bugs, or continue to provide bug fixes (security vulnerabilities are bugs). This is totally orthogonal to letting the owner of the phone run whatever software he wants. As windows has shown, it is quite possible.
And as Windows has shown, doing so greatly increase the chance that your device will be infected with viruses and all sorts of malware. A problem that Android is increasingly facing as well.
The law says that jailbreaking is legal, but it doesn’t say that Apple can’t stop you from doing it. Apple’s jail is also legal, and you can only break out of it when Apple makes a mistake. I wouldn’t defend antitrust as a “consistent legal theory,” but if Epic wins this case, all iOS users would have the freedom to use alternative app stores, not only those who manage to find and exploit vulnerabilities before Apple patches them.
But the DMCA also prevents you from reverse engineering Apple's software, so although jailbreaking is legal, you are not allowed to work on a new jailbreak.
The question is whether the law requires Apple to code their OS to make that easy for you. It’s up to the courts of course, but I’m skeptical there is a viable, consistent legal theory available to Epic under current law.