Apple Developer Program License Agreement: subscription seats arrive in two waves

What changed in the Apple Developer Program License Agreement

The fox reads the contract before the commentary. On 13 October 2026 Apple's developer news page recorded that the Apple Developer Program License Agreement has been revised to support new features and updated policies. The revision touches Section 3.2 and, more importantly for a subscription app, Schedules 2 and 3, the two schedules that govern paid apps. PPC Land's reading of the changes is that Schedule 2 now covers Group Purchases and Schedule 3 covers Volume Purchases.

A revision to the Apple Developer Program License Agreement is the first public hint of how a feature will be sold, because the contract arrives before the console does. Apple previewed both features at WWDC26 in June, when its newsroom said volume purchasing will be available this fall, with group purchases coming this winter. The October text turns that preview into contract language.

The 22 October date comes from The Mac Observer, which attributes it to Apple, and I could not confirm it on an Apple page other than the index listing of Apple's developer news. MacRumors was vaguer in June, saying group purchases would arrive later this year. Plan on the date, and keep a spare week.

How a seat works, and what a volume purchase program Apple buyer expects

Anyone who has bought devices for a school or a company will recognise the idea. Searches such as volume purchase program Apple code and Apple Business Manager apps show how long institutions have bought licences in bulk, and the new schedules extend that habit from one-off apps to recurring subscriptions. Volume Purchases, per the schedule summary, let institutions buy seats through Apple Business or Apple School Manager.

Group Purchases are different, and closer to a team plan in a consumer app. In Apple's WWDC26 session, the Group Purchases feature lets a single subscriber buy multiple seats and invite others directly from your app. By default, every seat of your subscription is sold at the current price in App Store Connect, and you can set up to 5 price bands, with full control over the quantities required for each band, and the price.

Two consequences follow for the people who write the paywall. First, a seat needs a price that makes sense per person and per band, which is a pricing decision long before it is a design one. Second, the buyer and the user are no longer the same person, so the invitation flow becomes marketing copy: the organiser has to explain the plan to the people they invite.

What Apple has not said yet

The gaps matter as much as the headlines. No Apple page opened for this piece states a commission rate for group or volume seats. Apple's published subscription terms say that during a subscriber's first year of service, you receive 70% of the subscription price at each billing cycle, minus applicable taxes, and that members of the App Store Small Business Program receive 85% starting on the first day. PPC Land reports that the schedules carry 30% falling to 15% after a year, which matches the standard rates but is not a statement Apple has put on a public page.

Regions are the second gap. The agreement is worldwide, but no opened Apple page says which countries Group Purchases or Volume Purchases will cover at launch. The third gap is refunds. PPC Land quotes the schedule as saying Apple will not grant partial refunds for any subscription that is currently accessed by an active Group Member, which is the sort of sentence a support team needs before the first angry organiser writes in.

The binding Apple Developer Program License Agreement text lives in the developer account, where the revision has to be accepted, so read the version your team signs. That is also where the discrepancies PPC Land noted get resolved, such as its remark that the tax-disclosure clause says Apple may disclose data to tax authorities, not that it will.

Pricing and pitching a seat when the benchmarks are consumer

B2B subscription benchmarks are scarce, which is why careful teams borrow the nearest honest number. RevenueCat's report analysed over 115,000 apps across all app categories, and its Business category is the closest neighbour. The figures are consumer-app data from one vendor's customer base, so treat them as a floor for a seat-based product, not a forecast.

• 2.6%

  median day-35 download-to-paid conversion

• 5.0%

  top-quartile download-to-paid conversion

• $4.99 to $6.89

  weekly price band, with Business highest

Those numbers come from RevenueCat's Business breakdown, which also reports that Shopping and Business are among the purest subscription categories. A second vendor gives a different picture of the funnel: Adapty reports a 10.9% install-to-trial and 25.6% trial-to-paid global average across about 16,000 apps. The two datasets measure different steps, so do not average them.

What the numbers cannot tell you is how a team plan converts. That is the gap a seat-based paywall opens. The fox would test it the slow way: one price band, one organiser audience, one invitation message, and a written hypothesis about how many invitees each organiser brings.

One more rule to check before shipping seats. Apple's review guidelines say consumer, single user, or family sales must use in-app purchase, while enterprise-only sales to organisations sit under a separate guideline. Which side your app falls on decides whether seats belong in StoreKit or in your own contracts.

Four moves for an app team before 22 October

None of this needs a rebuild this week. It needs decisions, written down, by someone who owns the revenue line. It is patient prowl work: pick up the scent of each schedule, follow its trail through the undergrowth of the account settings, and do not leave the den until the price bands exist on paper. The Apple Developer Program License Agreement rewards the reader who walks the whole hedgerow. The same discipline runs through folkfox's app marketing services and its work on FinTech marketing, where team plans and regulated buyers meet.

If you run a regulated product, add a fifth move: check whether the app's claims survive being shown to an organiser's whole team. A seat is a purchase that other people experience.

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