Apple cut its EU rates, then locked the gate for twelve months
Every European Union app team has six weeks to model a decision it cannot reverse until October 2027. The headline is a rate cut. The fine print is a lock on the gate.
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What the new apple app store commission actually costs#
flat Core Technology Commission replaces the per-install Core Technology Fee on 1 October 2026, charged on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store.
A fox reads a gate before it goes through one. Apple painted a handsome new gate on 18 August 2026, and the price list nailed to the post looks generous: the revised apple app store commission for the European Union cuts the headline rate, scraps two entire fee lines, and retires a per-install charge nobody with a freemium model could budget for. Read the hinges, though, and this gate swings one way for a year.
Here is the record, from Apple's own documents rather than the write-ups. Apple Newsroom published the changes on 18 August 2026 and dated them to 1 October 2026. The updated Apple Developer Program License Agreement, quoted on Apple's developer support page, says the Core Technology Fee, "a per-install fee for developers who achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5% commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store," and that "the new terms also eliminate the Initial Acquisition Fee and Store Services Fee."
That per-install fee was the stone in the shoe. Apple's own communication and promotion of offers page still lists it at 0.50 euro per first annual install above one million installs a year, and now carries a line confirming those terms end on 1 October 2026. A charge scaling with downloads rather than revenue punished precisely the products that give the thing away and monetise a slice.
The apple app store commission rate card, route by route#
Those starting values are arithmetic, not estimates. Apple's own table currently sets a 2% initial acquisition fee, a store services fee of 5% on Tier 1 or 13% on Tier 2, and a 5% Core Technology Commission. Stack them and a Tier 2 developer pays 20 points to send a customer to their own website.
One honest caveat, since what a developer pays today is stacked from components rather than charged as one apple app store commission: those components carry different attribution windows, six months from first install for the acquisition fee, twelve months from the most recent install for store services.
| Route to the customer | Standard | Reduced |
|---|---|---|
| Apple In-App Purchase | 26% | 15% |
| Alternative payment in the app | 20% | 10% |
| Out-of-app offer, link-out | 15% | 10% |
| Outside the App Store entirely | 5% | 5% |
Read that card as a corridor, not a menu. The spread between Apple's rails and the open web is eleven points for a standard developer and five for anyone on a programme rate, and a link-out counts only sales made within seven days of the tap. That window is the quiet detail most teams miss, because it turns a distribution decision into an attribution problem, which is the thicket folkfox lives in on app marketing engagements.
The twelve-month lock buried under the apple app store commission cut#
Now the hinge. Every account of this leads on the numbers, and the numbers are the least interesting thing in the document. The condition that will cost European teams real money is one sentence about time.
Apple's EU payment options page puts it plainly: once you select a payment option or combination, "you must maintain that choice across all EU storefronts for 12 months." Apple In-App Purchase, alternative payment processing inside the app, out-of-app offers with actionable links, or any mix of them. Pick, then hold, for a full year, across every storefront in the bloc.
That changes the character of the decision. A rate is a price, and a price you can answer next quarter. A twelve-month commitment is a bet you place once. The apple app store commission is now cheaper to get right and far more expensive to get wrong, because a correction that used to take a sprint takes a year.
Consider the plausible failure. A subscription business models it in September, sees a 15% link-out beat a 26% in-app purchase, and moves checkout to the web. Then the real data lands: web checkout converts worse than the native sheet, the seven-day window strands considered purchases, and the payment provider takes its own cut. The saving is a loss, and the exit stays bolted until October.
Most of the reaction concentrated on what left rather than what arrived. Eric Seufert, who writes Mobile Dev Memo and wrote the book on freemium economics, posted his read on 19 August:
Certainly, this new regime is simpler and more legible. First and foremost, the CTF was unworkable ... a fixed-amount per-install fee breaks the freemium (and free-to-play) model and grievously impairs the economics of mobile app user acquisition. But the terms are generally friendlier to developers, especially to developers whose apps are distributed through alternative app marketplaces (few of which have achieved material traction to date).
That parenthesis is the honest part: the routes Apple just made cheaper are routes almost nobody uses yet. Seufert's fuller argument sits on Mobile Dev Memo, and its central point matches ours. A percentage commission is legible in a way a per-install fee never was, which makes modelling the apple app store commission possible for the first time and therefore makes it compulsory. There is no defensible way to pick a route on instinct when the choice is welded shut for a year.
A second condition rides alongside the lock, and it lands hardest on anyone building for younger audiences. Apple's payment options page requires Kids category apps to place alternative payment flows behind a parental gate and offer no out-of-app website purchase at all. For users under 13, "alternative payment purchases must be behind a parental gate, and out-of-app offers are not permitted." For 13 to 17 year olds both routes need a parental gate, and where a storefront sets a higher age for parental consent, the higher age applies.
A family-facing product therefore has fewer routes to weigh before it starts modelling the apple app store commission at all, which belongs in a brand strategy conversation about audience long before it becomes a finance conversation about margin.
Who actually wins on the new in app purchase fees#
The repetition across four of those five panels is not a rendering fault, it is the finding. Apple has flattened the Small Business Program, the Mini Apps Partner Program, the Video Partner Program and second-year subscriptions onto one identical rate card, so for most European developers the whole apple app store commission decision is worth five points and no more. Prowl the numbers before you prowl the press release.
For the standard tier the spread is more than double that, and those developers face the sharpest version of the twelve-month bet. TechCrunch and 9to5Mac both note the same shape: a genuine simplification wrapped around an apple app store commission that still rewards staying on Apple's rails.
Chase the lowest number on the card
We saw 15% beats 26%, moved checkout to the web, and told the board we saved eleven points. Nobody measured web conversion against the native sheet, nobody modelled the seven-day attribution window, and the payment provider's own cut never made the slide. In January the numbers came in worse and the route was locked until October.
Price the route, not the rate
We took twelve months of European Union revenue, applied each rate, then adjusted for measured checkout conversion on our own funnel, processing costs, refund handling and the reporting burden. Three routes landed within two points of each other, so we stayed on In-App Purchase and kept the option to move in October 2027.
The academic literature says something a rate card cannot. In a working paper presented to the American Economic Association, Byoungmin Yu of Iowa State University estimated demand and developer cost parameters from music apps on Apple's App Store in the United States between October 2018 and February 2024, then ran policy counterfactuals. A cap on commission fees raised developers' innovative effort and social welfare. When the platform added a unit fee scheme underneath that cap, developers passed part of it straight to users by raising in-app purchase prices.
Read that against a per-install charge swapped for a percentage and the direction is encouraging: the unit fee is what gets passed to the customer, and the unit fee is what just went. A second study points the other way, and honesty requires both. In Marketing Science, Siddhartha Sharma and Amit Mehra model two competing platforms and a representative developer, and find that cutting a commission rate does not reliably improve content quality or consumer surplus, because platforms recover the difference through device pricing. A lower apple app store commission is good to have. It is not, on the evidence, a guarantee of anything downstream.
The quiet part: alternative app marketplaces just got far easier to open#
While everyone counted percentage points, Apple removed the wall around the second door. Running an alternative marketplace used to demand heavyweight financial backing or a proven million first annual installs, a threshold that read less like a safeguard than a hedgerow planted to keep the field empty.
Strip the list back and the practical change is that a well-run, audited European software company with no venture backing and no listing can now open a marketplace, where before it could not. That is a real widening of the trail. Whether anyone walks it is another question, and the honest answer today is that alternative app marketplaces have almost no traction to point at, so a low barrier and a 5% commission may still not draw a serious operator out of the undergrowth.
The steering fight underneath this is not new, which is why we have covered it twice: once on app store fees after the Epic ruling and once on App Store commission and the Supreme Court. The pattern repeats across jurisdictions. A regulator opens a door, the platform reprices the doorway, and whoever moves first on incomplete data pays for everyone else's education.
In regulated categories the calculus is sharper. A payments or lending product carries licensing, know-your-customer and dispute obligations a game does not, so moving checkout off Apple's rails imports a compliance workload as well as a conversion risk. That is the conversation folkfox has most often on fintech marketing projects, and it usually ends the same way: the cheapest line on the apple app store commission card is rarely the cheapest route through the year.
What to do about the apple app store commission before 1 October#
Six weeks is enough to model this properly and nowhere near enough to model it twice, so sequence matters more than speed. Start with the money you already have, not the rate card you were handed.
A commission rate is a price you can answer next quarter. A twelve-month commitment is a bet you place once.
The first move is unglamorous and non-negotiable: measure your own checkout. Almost every published comparison of in app purchase fees against a web checkout quietly assumes conversion holds constant across the two, and on every funnel we have measured it does not. Without your own native-sheet conversion rate set against your own web checkout, you do not have the input that decides this.
The second move is to check which side of the card you are on. If you sit in the Small Business Program, the Mini Apps Partner Program, the Video Partner Program, or you earn most of your revenue from second-year subscriptions, your whole route decision is worth five points. Weigh that against a second payment integration, the monthly reporting Apple imposes on external purchases, refunds and disputes, and for many teams the honest answer on the apple app store commission is to stay put and spend the quarter on content and acquisition instead.
The third move is to read the transition dates rather than the headline date. Apple signalled this shift over a year ago, in a developer news item dated 26 June 2025 that announced the move from the Core Technology Fee to the Core Technology Commission. Current terms stay live until you agree to the new ones, and your account moves across on 1 October 2026 or the date you agree, whichever is later. PPC Land's reading is that the rate card now sets the ceiling on what an app business can pay to acquire a user, which is the right frame: this is a user acquisition constraint wearing a finance department's clothing.
The fox that comes through a hard autumn is not the one that bolted at the first open gate. It is the one that sat in the birch shadow, watched which way the hinge swung, and stepped through on its own timing. Treat the new apple app store commission the same way. Model the route, measure your own funnel, then decide whether the door is worth walking, because on 1 October it stops being a door and becomes a decision you own until autumn 2027.
Frequently asked questions#
How to avoid apple app store fees?
You cannot avoid the apple app store commission entirely on iOS in the European Union, but from 1 October 2026 you can pick the cheapest lawful route. Distributing outside the App Store costs a 5% Core Technology Commission, a web link-out costs 15% or 10%, alternative in-app payment costs 20% or 10%, and Apple In-App Purchase costs 26% or 15%. Each route carries its own engineering, conversion and reporting cost.
What is the new apple app store commission in the EU?
From 1 October 2026 Apple charges 26% on In-App Purchase, 20% on alternative in-app payment processing, 15% on out-of-app link-outs, and a flat 5% Core Technology Commission on apps distributed outside the App Store. Small Business Program, Mini Apps, Video Partner and second-year subscription revenue pay 15% or 10% instead.
What is the twelve-month payment lock?
Apple requires that once a developer selects a payment option or combination for the European Union, they maintain that choice across all EU storefronts for twelve months. That covers Apple In-App Purchase, alternative in-app processing, out-of-app offers with actionable links, or any mix of them. A route chosen in October 2026 cannot change until October 2027.
Has the apple app store commission actually gone down?
For most routes, yes. For one the app store commission rate rises. Summing Apple's own published component rates, a standard Tier 1 link-out developer currently pays about 12 points across the initial acquisition fee, store services fee and Core Technology Commission, and will pay a single 15% store services commission from 1 October. Tier 2 developers fall from about 20 points to 15.
Who can open one of the alternative app marketplaces now?
From 1 October 2026, any developer meeting one of seven criteria: a Dun and Bradstreet stability score, public listing, venture funding, a completed audit, nonprofit or government status, a one million US dollar standby letter of credit, or a million first annual installs worldwide. Apple also dropped the requirement to hold an EU legal entity.
Do the new rules change anything for apps aimed at children?
Yes, substantially. Kids category apps must place alternative payment flows behind a parental gate and cannot offer an out-of-app website purchase at all. For users under 13, out-of-app offers are not permitted. For users aged 13 to 17, both alternative in-app payment and out-of-app offers must sit behind a parental gate.
Is the European Commission satisfied with these terms?
The Commission has welcomed the changes and says it is monitoring the measure rather than considering periodic penalty payments. The Coalition for App Fairness disagrees, calling the revised rates still excessive and urging regulators to reconsider. The position is not final.
Read more on this topic#
App store fees after the Epic ruling
The American half of the same fight, and the closest thing to a natural experiment in what happens when a link-out is finally allowed.
Read the pieceApp Store commission and the Supreme Court
How the commission question reached the top court, and why the answer keeps arriving as a reprice rather than a removal.
Read the pieceApple Maps ads and prohibited categories
The other Apple rulebook worth reading before you plan a quarter, this one about who is allowed to advertise at all.
Read the pieceOpenAI Just Split ChatGPT in Two, and Only Half Sees Your Ads
Another platform building age gates into its commercial layer, and what that pattern does to reach when your audience skews young.
Read the piece
Six weeks to model a twelve-month decision
We price every European Union route against your own funnel, your own conversion data and your own compliance load, then tell you plainly which apple app store commission to accept and hold until October 2027.