If you develop apps for iOS or have some familiarity with iOS development the you will have heard of the reviled “Apple Tax”.
App developers were forced to use Apple in-app purchasing APIs, and pay a 30% commission on all sales. Apps were forbidden to offer links to payment methods outside the Apple ecosystem – i.e a link to a website. In fact developers couldn’t even mention the fact other non Apple payment options existed.
Smaller developers had no choice but to suck it up and include the 30% commission in their pricing, but with apps by larger companies such as Spotify and YouTube, this created a situation where if you subscribed to their service within the iOS app you paid a higher price – in order to offset Apple commission.
This has all changed since April 2025 when USA federal judge has forced Apple to allow developers to give users the option of using other payment methods. This decision came from a ruling in 2021 as a result of a court case brought by Epic, the makers of the popular online game Fortnite. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apples restrictions on allowing developers to include links to other payment methods in app were un-competitive, so issued an injunction requiring Apple to remove these restrictions.
Apple complied with the injunction, but added terms that were so onerous that it was still easier to just handle payments from apple. Developers could allow links to external payment methods, but they still had to pay a 27% commission.
Some four years later, Judge Gonzalez Rogers decided that Apple had not fully complied with the injunction and added further stipulations to the injunction as follows
- Stop collecting any commission on purchases through external links
- Allow developers to include links, buttons and other legitimate means of directing users to external payment solutions
- Remove any UI/UX barriers that influence a users choice to use an external payment method, except for a message informing the user they are leaving the app.
The judge also criticised the Apple CEO Tim Cooks decision to ignore internal advice to comply with the injunction and referred the case to federal prosecutors for potential criminal charges against Apple and it’s executives.
App store commissions are a multi-billion dollar chunk of vast revenues Apple and the company isnt prepared to let them go without a fight. Although they publicly stated that they will comply with the ruling, they have scheduled an appeal against the decision.
It looks like this situation will go on for some time yet.
