Analysis
Apple is asking a federal judge to let it charge commissions of up to 15% on purchases made through external links inside iOS apps, according to a TechCrunch report on a filing submitted Thursday in the U.S. District Court of Northern California -- the company's latest attempt to define what an 'open' App Store actually costs developers.
The proposal lands after years of court fights stemming from Epic Games' original antitrust suit, which forced Apple to allow external payment links in the first place. Apple had been resisting a concrete commission number on those external transactions; the Supreme Court's decision the same day to reject Apple's bid to pause further lower-court action effectively forced the company to put a structure on paper.
## The tiered commission structure What Apple proposed is tiered rather than flat: standard apps pay 15%, small-business developers earning under Apple's existing revenue threshold pay 5%, apps enrolled in Apple's Video Partner, News Partner or Mini Apps Partner programs pay 10%, and subscription renewals -- as opposed to first-time purchases -- also drop to 10%, per 9to5Mac's breakdown.
“For comparison, Apple's standard in-App-Store commission has long sat at 30%, cut to 15% for developers under $1 million in annual revenue since 2020.”
For comparison, Apple's standard in-App-Store commission has long sat at 30%, cut to 15% for developers under $1 million in annual revenue since 2020. A 15% fee on external-link purchases -- transactions that never touch Apple's payment rails at all -- is roughly half the historical in-store rate, and developers who fought for years to route around Apple's payment system entirely are unlikely to see it as the concession Apple is framing it as. Epic Games, Spotify and the Coalition for App Fairness have all argued in prior filings that any fee on external transactions defeats the purpose of allowing them, since Apple provides no service on a transaction that happens outside its own checkout.
Apple's own justification -- that a 0% fee 'fails to account for the value the App Store provides,' including distribution, discovery, platform access and security tooling -- is the same argument the company has made throughout the multi-year Epic litigation, largely unchanged in substance even as the commission number itself has been forced downward by successive court rulings. Whether a federal judge accepts 15% as reasonable, or forces Apple lower still, is now the live question, with a ruling likely to shape not just Apple's App Store economics but the commission structures Google, Amazon and other platform operators use as their own legal benchmark.
What the headline number misses: even at 15%, Apple retains meaningful leverage over developer behavior, since apps still need Apple's blessing to display external links at all, and the tiered structure gives Apple discretion over which developers qualify for the lower rates. A 15% floor on paper does not guarantee 15% in practice for every developer who wants to use it.
The next milestone is the judge's ruling on whether this structure satisfies the court's prior orders in the Epic case -- expect Epic, Spotify and the Coalition for App Fairness to file objections arguing the proposal doesn't go far enough before that ruling lands.
