Developers everywhere rejoice as the walls around Apple’s 30% fee continue to be systematically dismantled by governments.
Apple was handed a significant setback by a U.S. Federal Court yesterday in the ongoing legal battles over purchases related to mobile applications on the iPhone. GamesBeat’s overview article offers a concise overview of the ruling and summarizes the core finding quite nicely.
A federal district court judge found that Apple willfully violated a court order in Epic Games vs. Apple antitrust case … The judge said that “in stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony,” the documents revealed that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option.
The short-term impact is that Apple will not be able to charge a 27% “tax” on web storefronts that are linked from the game. It’s worth noting that this was already true in the EU due to the Digital Markets Act. Joost Van Dreunen puts the event into a more detailed historical perspective in a post entitled Bad Apple. The days of the Walled Garden charging 30% are clearly numbered. And, as always, Eric Seufert has magnificently chronicled the entire adventure.
This is a huge win for developers and will accelerate the current trends towards web storefronts. It is also almost certainly a foreshadowing of what is to come in 2026 / 2027.
Here at GDP we expect that
- Other walled gardens will continue to crumble. The EU’s enforcement actions against Meta will continue to gain steam, and the expansion of regulatory oversight of large-scale platforms will continue on all fronts. This is part of a large-scale societal trend as we all continue to grapple with the pervasive nature of modern technology.
- Alternative payments platforms and SDKs will continue to gain ground. Not just in Europe, but in America as well. There simply isn’t much in the way of a limiting principle in place in any of the legal injunctions—the reasoning in this ruling logically extends to the idea that alternative payments SDKS (such as Xsolla’s SDK) will eventually be allowed, even in games that are downloaded via Apple’s publishing platform.
- The combined pressure of lower-friction web storefronts, alternative distribution mechanisms, and alternative payment SDKs will eventually cause Apple (and Google) to drop the 30% fee on in-app purchases.
- With a wide variety of different and lower-cost payment options, the case for experimentation and personalization in payments (which we talked about as part of our 2025 predictions) becomes even more compelling
