Apple tells regulators it may collect nothing on third-party store sales

Apple has warned in its latest regulatory filings that it "may not earn a commission at all" on purchases made through alternative payment systems, according to the Financial Times ^[1]. For teams that have been modeling third-party distribution against a rate card that kept moving, this is the first time the company itself has put zero on the table ^[1].

The admission sits alongside a proposal Apple recently submitted for lower commissions on sales made outside the App Store: 15% for standard apps, which carry a 30% in-app purchase commission ^[3]; 10% for the Video Partner Program, the News Partner Program, the Mini Apps Partner Program and subscription renewals ^[4]; and 5% for Small Business Program apps ^[5]. Apple's stated justification for charging anything is that it supplies Xcode and other tools developers use to build their apps ^[6].

That proposal is already a retreat from where Apple started. The company had imposed a 27% commission on in-app content sold outside the App Store ^[7], and with payment processing costs running around 3%, developers ended up paying the same either way ^[8]. Add those together and the cost of leaving Apple's payment rails was about 30%, which is the standard in-app purchase rate ^[13]. The judge in the Epic Games case called that a clear abuse of the intent of her ruling, while Apple argued the court had never specified an acceptable rate for external sales ^[9]. The proposed 15% standard rate is 12 percentage points below the 27% Apple had been charging ^[14].

The operational point is the width of the band, not the midpoint. A developer building a business case for a third-party store or an external checkout now has to plan across a commission range running from 0% to 15% for a standard app ^[15], and Apple's own filing is the source for the bottom of that range ^[1]. Anything modeled at a single assumed rate is a guess dressed as a forecast. The 5% Small Business Program tier and the 10% partner-program tier narrow the band for those cohorts ^[5][4], but they are proposals, not settled terms ^[3].

None of this arrived quickly. Regulators objected that the only route to selling iPhone apps and in-app content was Apple's own store, which let the company set its own rates ^[10]. The EU was the first jurisdiction to force Apple to allow third-party app stores, and a US court required it to let developers offer in-app purchases and subscriptions through external payment platforms ^[11]. The Financial Times describes the new disclosure as the clearest sign yet that court rulings and regulatory intervention in the US, Europe and elsewhere are starting to erode the commission fees underpinning Apple's high-margin services business ^[2].

Watch two things. First, whether the court accepts the tiered proposal, sets a different number, or lands on nothing, because that determines which end of the 0-to-15 band becomes the planning assumption ^[15][3]. Second, Services revenue: analysts say it may start to fall for the first time, with consequences for Apple's valuation ^[12].