Apple Proposes 5-to-15% Fee on Purchases Made Outside the App Store

Apple told a federal court Thursday it wants to charge developers between 5% and 15% on purchases customers make through external links, the latest move in its six-year legal war with Epic Games over App Store control.

The filing, made in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, lays out a tiered structure. Standard apps would pay 15%. Developers in Apple's Video Partner Program, News Partner Program, and Mini Apps Partner Program would pay 10%, as would subscription renewals. Developers enrolled in Apple's Small Business Program, which the company says covers the "vast majority" of developers on the platform, would pay 5%, according to filings reported by 9to5Mac and MacRumors.

Apple didn't want to file this at all, at least not yet. The company asked the courts to delay the proceedings until the Supreme Court ruled on a separate, related question: whether Apple was in contempt of a 2021 injunction when it charged a 27% commission on external-link purchases and restricted how developers could display those links. The Supreme Court rejected that delay request Thursday, forcing Apple's hand.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered Apple in 2021 to let developers link out to external payment systems so they wouldn't be stuck paying Apple's standard 30% App Store cut. Apple complied on paper but kept charging 12% to 27% on those external transactions anyway. Judge Gonzalez Rogers found Apple in contempt last year and ordered it to stop collecting any fee on external purchases. An appeals court upheld the contempt finding but overturned the zero-fee order, kicking the question of what's "reasonable" back to the district court.

Apple's filing contains an admission. Under the Ninth Circuit's definition of what fees are strictly necessary to facilitate a linked-out purchase, Apple concedes those actual costs are effectively zero, according to reporting from iPhone in Canada and Epic Games' own public statements on the filing. Apple's argument for charging anything beyond that rests on a different claim: that it deserves compensation for the broader tools, technology, and intellectual property that support its developer ecosystem, a position the company says both the district court and the Ninth Circuit have acknowledged as legitimate.

Apple also points to Google as a benchmark. Google Play charges 20% on standard external-link purchases, 15% for partner-program apps, and 10% on subscription renewals, and Epic agreed to those terms in its parallel settlement with Google. Apple's filing argues its proposed rates, all lower than Google's, are reasonable by comparison. Google itself only opened Play Store to external billing on June 30 and started allowing third-party app stores on Android in July, and it's still fighting Epic in court over how difficult it makes installing those rival stores, with a judge recently ordering Google to remove what it called "anticompetitive friction," according to The Verge.

Epic isn't buying Apple's framing. The company's argument, laid out in a filing cited by iPhone in Canada, is that if Apple's own analysis shows necessary costs are near zero, then a 5% to 15% commission has no basis under the Ninth Circuit's standard. Epic has said it has about 60 days to formally contest Apple's numbers with its own expert testimony.

The App Store's review process, fraud protection, developer tools like Xcode and TestFlight, and platform-wide security infrastructure cost real money to build and maintain, and Apple isn't wrong that courts have generally accepted some fee is permissible for that value, not just the marginal cost of processing a link click. The dispute isn't over whether Apple can charge anything. It's over how much, and whether Apple is using "ecosystem value" as a stand-in for a fee designed to make external payment options unattractive rather than genuinely competitive.

Apple's filing states its own expert analysis found that developers accounting for the majority of App Store revenue would still be able to link out profitably at these proposed rates, which Apple argues satisfies the court's stated goal of creating real competitive pressure on its in-app payment system.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers still has to rule on whether Apple's proposed rates meet the legal standard set by the Ninth Circuit, and that ruling won't come until after Epic's expert witnesses weigh in over the next roughly two months. The Supreme Court's separate review of whether Apple's earlier 27% fee amounted to violating a court order is also still pending, and that outcome could reshape how this entire fee dispute gets resolved.