Apple's Filing Admits the Number Is Zero. It Asked for 15%.
Apple's Filing Admits the Number Is Zero. It Asked for 15%.
"Apple proposed new commissions of 15% for standard apps, with further discounts for developers who are enrolled in special Apple programs." — TechCrunch, August 14, 2026
Before the number, the baseline.
In April 2025, a judge found Apple in contempt and barred it from charging any commission at all on external-link purchases. In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit partly reversed that, calling a blanket ban punitive: Apple may charge a reasonable, non-prohibitive fee covering the necessary costs of coordinating link-outs plus some compensation for its IP. Setting the actual number went back to the district court.
So the rate developers pay on link-outs today is 0%, and has been for fifteen months. What Apple filed on August 13 is its answer to what that zero should become.
Seven things worth your attention — in that filing, and in the second document Apple filed the same day.
1. The Ask: 15%, With a Discount Menu
"Under the proposed structure, small business developers would pay a 5% commission on payments, while those in the Video Partner Program, News Partner Program, and Mini Apps Partner Program would pay 10%. Subscription renewals would also be reduced to 10%, the filing states." — TechCrunch
The proposal in one sentence: when a user taps a link, leaves your app, and pays you on your own site with your own payment stack, Apple still wants a cut.
- Standard apps: 15%
- Small Business Program (under $1M/year): 5%
- Video, News, and Mini Apps Partner Program members: 10%
- Subscription renewals: 10%
Apple hosts nothing, processes nothing, refunds nothing, provides no checkout, and touches no part of the transaction.
My take: The reflex is "15% is half of 30%, so Apple's being reasonable." That's anchoring doing its job. The right comparison isn't 30% — it's the 0% that is currently operative law. Apple isn't discounting anything. It's pricing a transaction it has no involvement in and, today, no right to bill.
2. Filed on the Minute, the Day It Lost
"The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected Apple's bid to pause further action in the lower court's case, forcing the company to reveal its planned commission structure." — TechCrunch
Apple's posture throughout has been to stall — it argued the rate-setting should wait for the Supreme Court to rule on whether Apple was in contempt when it imposed 27% and dictated how developers could present links.
The sequence is tight enough to look undignified. Tuesday, August 11: the district court orders Apple to file its rates. Thursday, August 13: the Supreme Court denies the stay. Same day, Apple files — at 5:00 p.m. ET, the deadline minute, per AppleInsider.
The second filing is the more interesting one. Apple also moved to refer both parties to a settlement conference before Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero, arguing it would give them "an opportunity to explore a potential resolution of the dispute while remand proceedings take place in parallel." The motion states plainly that Apple conferred with Epic's counsel on August 11 and that Epic did not consent.
My take: A document you can file within hours of losing a procedural motion was drafted long before. Apple wasn't undecided; it was holding. And filing a rate proposal and a settlement request the same afternoon says something specific: Apple would rather negotiate this number than have a judge set it. Companies confident about a ruling don't ask for mediation on filing day.
3. The Google Comparison Is a Chosen Anchor, Not Evidence
"The company also compared its link-out fees to those on Google Play, which charges 20% link-out rates for standard apps, 15% for apps in special programs, and 10% for subscription renewals, noting that Epic Games had agreed to these rates." — TechCrunch
Apple put the comparison in the filing itself, and picked it carefully:
| Standard | Special programs | Subscription renewals | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Play | 20% | 15% | 10% |
| Apple's proposal | 15% | 10% / 5% | 10% |
Then the jab: Epic agreed to those Google rates.
The point isn't saving developers money — it's swapping the measuring stick. The question stops being "may Apple charge for this at all?" and becomes "Apple charges less than Google, so what's the complaint?" It also hands the judge a ready-made yardstick, and judges hate setting prices from scratch.
My take: 30% to 27% to 15%. The rate keeps falling; the reasoning hasn't moved a word. 27% was "30% minus the processing you now do yourself." 15% is the same premise in a friendlier build: if the transaction starts on my device, I'm owed. And the borrowed yardstick has an unstated flaw — Google's link-out rates were themselves produced under litigation pressure as part of a settlement. Using one court-shaped number to validate another is circular. It only looks like market evidence.
4. Three Tiers Because One Rate Would Build a Coalition
A flat rate unites everyone who pays it. A tiered rate splits them.
- 5% — small businesses under $1M. Largest group by headcount, loudest online, cheapest to satisfy: App Store revenue is concentrated at the top, so this tier is a rounding error. Excellent return on PR spend, and it arms Apple with a line that's very hard to answer in a hearing: "we charge small developers 5%."
- 10% — Partner Program members and subscription renewals. This tier names its targets: Netflix, Spotify, news publishers. The companies that fought hardest over commissions, and the ones most capable of leaving, because they own the brand, the web funnel, and the billing relationship.
- 15% — everyone else. Where the money is actually collected: mid-sized developers who outgrew the small business program and never got a special deal. Fewer of them, poorly organized, with neither Epic's legal budget nor the indie's moral standing.
My take: A politically literate rate card, and the 10% tier is the tell. Apple's nightmare isn't a lower percentage — it's losing ownership of the subscription relationship. Once a user's card lives somewhere else, the rate is irrelevant, because there's nothing left to bill. 10% is a "please stay" price. The tiering isn't just pricing; it's opposition management.
5. Apple Undercut Its Own "Recouping Investment" Argument
"Apple's position is that it should be permitted to charge fees on in-app purchases made by users of its devices as a means to recoup its investments in the tools, technology, and services that allow it to maintain its App Store and software." — TechCrunch
That argument is real — Xcode, Swift, the frameworks, review infrastructure. The question was never whether Apple deserves compensation, but what form it may take: a flat annual developer fee, defensible; a percentage of transactions Apple actually processes, defensible — you built the checkout, you get paid for the checkout; a percentage of transactions Apple has no involvement in, which requires arguing that owning the device entitles you to the commerce running across it.
And here Apple said the quiet part in its own filing. Per reporting on the proffer by MLex and AppleInsider, Apple acknowledged that under the Ninth Circuit's narrow "necessary costs" framework, the appropriate commission would be effectively zero — the incremental coordination costs plus permitted IP compensation are de minimis. Apple didn't dispute the arithmetic. It argued that compensating it only for those costs would create economic distortions and amount to impermissible price regulation.
My take: The most revealing paragraph in the filing. It concedes that 15% is not a cost-recovery number, because the cost-recovery number is approximately nothing. 15% is value pricing — a price on the fact that you run your business on Apple's hardware. That's the slide from a service fee to ground rent, happening in the open. Whether courts allow it is a legal question, but the two shouldn't keep sharing the phrase "recouping our investment."
6. The Developer Math: This Experiment Already Ran
A $100 digital sale, standard app. Through IAP: Apple takes $30, you keep $70 — one tap, best conversion, zero operational burden.
Through an external link at the proposed 15%:
- Apple's commission: $15
- Payment processing (Stripe, card networks): ~$3
- Tax compliance, invoicing, refunds, chargebacks, support, fraud: ~$3–5
- Conversion loss from bouncing users into a browser: typically double digits in percentage terms
Paper cost lands around $21–23. Add the funnel drop and realized revenue plausibly lands below the $70 you'd have kept by doing nothing.
Not a thought experiment — it already ran. As MacRumors summarized when the Ninth Circuit ruled: under the 27% program, "almost no developers opted in to Apple's link program because it ended up being more expensive than the in-app purchase fees." And note what the appeals court preserved: Apple may still restrict how prominent external links are — they cannot outshine in-app purchase buttons. That conversion penalty isn't something better design recovers. It's written into the rules.
My take: This is where 15% does its real work. Apple doesn't need external payments to be impossible, only uneconomic. The moment most developers run this spreadsheet and conclude "IAP is still better," the channel the courts spent six years prying open closes by itself. Apple enforces nothing; the math enforces it — as the 27% run already demonstrated.
7. The Endgame: The Entitlement, Not the Percentage
"The biggest problem with the commission prohibition is that it permanently prohibits the compensation that Apple can receive for linked-out purchases of digital products, regardless of whether the commission is itself prohibitive." — Ninth Circuit order, December 11, 2025 (quoted via MacRumors)
The old story: you used our checkout, so we take a cut. The new story: you used our device, so we take a cut.
The uncomfortable part for developers is that the Ninth Circuit already granted the entitlement in principle last December. Apple may charge something; it just has to be reasonable and non-prohibitive. What's left is a number. Apple's bet is that if the number lands at 15%, the scope gets fixed with it: wherever the user buys, whoever processes the money — if the journey started on an iPhone, Apple is owed.
Epic's position is equally clear. Per AppleInsider, Epic will appeal any value above 0%. It declined the settlement conference and is preparing its opposition.
My take: Developers are arguing about whether 15% is too high. Apple is trying to get "Apple may charge a percentage commission on external purchases" written into an order. Win that, and the percentage is just a parameter — parameters get renegotiated later, quietly. Run the district court's own cost-based formula honestly and you land very close to the number Apple already conceded in its own filing: zero. That gap, not the three points between 15 and 12, is the fight worth watching.
Closing
The consistent thing about Apple here is that the posture keeps moving and the position never does.
30% to 27%. 27% to 15%. Flat rate to three tiers. Defiance to "we're cheaper than Google," plus a settlement invitation slipped in on filing day. Every step is a retreat, and every step drives the same stake deeper: money that moves on an iPhone is partly Apple's money.
A court can change the number. Only an explicit ruling changes the logic. As of this writing (August 15, 2026), none of the proposed rates are in effect, Epic's opposition hasn't been filed, and the Supreme Court's review of the contempt finding is still pending.
Rates get revised. Power doesn't expire on its own.
Primary sources: TechCrunch, "Apple proposes to take a 15% cut of purchases made outside the App Store," August 14, 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/14/apple-proposes-to-take-a-15-cut-of-purchases-made-outside-the-app-store/ AppleInsider, August 13, 2026: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/08/13/apples-latest-commission-rates-for-external-app-store-purchases-havent-satisfied-epic Apple Inc.'s Administrative Motion for Referral to Settlement Conference, Epic Games, Inc. v. Apple Inc., No. 4:20-cv-05640-YGR, Dkt. 1710, filed August 13, 2026 MacRumors, "Apple Wins Ability to Charge Fees on External Payment Links as Appeals Court Modifies Epic Injunction," December 11, 2025: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/11/apple-app-store-fees-external-payment-links/