It isn’t exactly clear what changes Apple could have planned for the App Store. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple wants to “figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform,” and that this effort is largely driven by new CEO John Ternus and existing services SVP Eddy Cue.
Supposedly, this effort was part of the reason why longtime Apple executive Phil Schiller left the company last week. After departing from his role as marketing SVP in 2020, Schiller became an Apple Fellow – where part of his role was running the App Store. Schiller wasn’t a fan of the idea:
Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.
There’s a multitude of ways Apple could potentially raise margins from the App Store. It could get rid of its manual app review process, which is likely costly and not super effective in the age of agentic coding. People likely wouldn’t appreciate further automation of app review, though it would certainly be a way to cut on costs.
Considering how Apple is on and off as valuable company in the world, if true, this is terrible news and absolutely unnecessary. This would be a potentially very bad sign for the new CEO. I was hoping that putting a hardware person in charge of the company would bring us back to an Apple that puts products above services again, but this would be a needlessly greedy move. I hope it’s not true.
It could charge more for its developer membership, currently priced at $99/year. Given the fact that many small developers are spending $200/mo for Codex and Claude subscriptions to develop apps, you could argue Apple could charge more and get away with it. The company could also charge large developers a subscription fee based on traffic, to offload some of the infrastructure costs.
Only time can tell what this will turn into, though I’m certainly interested to see what the changes could possibly look like.
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Michael is 9to5Mac’s Weekend Editor, keeping up with all of the latest Apple news on Saturday and Sunday. He got started in the world of Apple news during the pandemic, and it became a growing hobby. He’s also an indie iOS developer in his free time, and has published numerous apps over the years.
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