A studio that spent August rewriting its EU purchase flow for Apple's flat 5% commission [16] will send its next question up a chain that terminates inside the division collecting that 5%. Services cleared more than $109bn in Apple's last full financial year, over a quarter of the company and its highest-margin line [9]. Bloomberg puts App Store direct revenue above $30bn [10], which works out to roughly 28 cents of every dollar in that services total [1]. For the executive who now owns the store, that is a large piece of the number his organisation reports, not a side file.
When a rule hurts them, developers file the appeal, work the account contact, and go to a regulator if that stalls. Product teams tell themselves that the org chart above App Review is trivia, because policy is policy. The Epic record argues the other way. The US ruling found that Schiller had argued internally for compliance and was overruled by Tim Cook [17]. Whoever makes that argument next will be making it from inside the services organisation.
The thing being pitched and the thing being done are different. The pitch is scale. Apple counts more than $1.4tn in transactions facilitated by the store last year [10], and Jacob Eiting of RevenueCat, who sells subscription tooling to developers, points out that a store which began with no apps and no revenue now pays developers on the order of $100bn a year [11]. The thing being done is narrower. Against $1.4tn facilitated, $30bn of direct revenue is about two cents on the dollar [2]. The trillion is Apple's own count of what passes through. The $30bn is the part that sits in services, next to Arcade and to Health, which Cue picked up at the end of last year [3], and it is the part with a manager attached to it.
It is partly a matter of subtraction, and none of this was presented as a promotion: Jeff Williams, Dan Riccio, Luca Maestri, Lisa Jackson, Kate Adams, Jennifer Bailey and Paul Meade have left or are leaving [19]. Tim Sweeney, six years into suing Apple over the store, said he hoped the company would grow by bringing computing to people rather than extracting more from them, and called it a new age for Apple [18]. Sweeney's comment describes what he wants Apple to do; the reshuffle describes what Apple's own incentives now push toward.
A forcing function you can use on your own open asks with Apple. Axis one: does granting it raise or lower Apple's own take. Axis two: does it require a published policy change or only a private exception. Asks that raise the take and need nothing published move quickly, and always have. Asks that lower the take and need publication are now a services budget decision, which means they move on court orders and regulatory deadlines rather than on escalation, so that is where legal spend goes. Asks that lower the take but stay case by case are the box where a developer relationship still buys something. That is the sorting that matters before the next fee revision, because the person deciding is now measured on the line the fee feeds.
