Apple's legal strategy in its App Store battle has, until very recently, worked exactly as designed. Delay. Appeal. Comply minimally. Appeal again. Buy time while $109 billion a year in Services revenue keeps compounding. This week, that strategy cracked in a way that's harder to paper over.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an earlier decision that had let Apple keep its current App Store commission structure in place while it appeals to the Supreme Court. The reversal means Apple must now return to a lower court to work out what fees it can charge developers who steer customers to outside payment options. It sounds procedural. It isn't. MacRumors
What the Ruling Actually Does — and Doesn't Do
Apple won on every count in the original Epic lawsuit except one: it was ordered to end its anti-steering rules and allow external purchases. What followed was a masterclass in malicious compliance. Apple implemented the external link requirement, then built a fee structure around it — a 27% fee on external payments — that effectively defeated the purpose of allowing them. Spotify added links. Kindle added links. Patreon added links. Almost no one else did, because the economics barely improved. AppleInsiderTechCrunch
Then things escalated. In April 2025, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple had "willfully" violated her injunction, barred Apple from collecting any commission on external links, and referred the case to the federal attorney's office for possible criminal contempt proceedings, finding that company executives had lied and knowingly took an anti-competitive route to try to demonstrate compliance. That last part — the referral for possible criminal contempt — didn't get nearly enough attention when it landed. Executives lying in federal court is not a footnote. Wikipedia
In December 2025, the appeals court delivered a split decision: Apple had violated the injunction, but the company should still be able to charge something reasonable. That sent the question of what that fee should look like back to the district court. MacRumors
Apple, not content with this outcome, asked the Ninth Circuit to pause everything while it petitioned the Supreme Court. The court wasn't persuaded: its filing stated that "Apple has failed to show good cause to sustain our prior stay order. Apple has not demonstrated that any proceedings on remand will cause it irreparable harm if our decision is not stayed." Translation: your argument that you'd be harmed by lower fees while the case continues doesn't hold up. TechCrunch
What's actually being decided now isn't whether Apple can have a fee — it can. It's whether a federal judge in San Francisco or a company with a $3 trillion market cap gets to decide what "reasonable" means.
Who Wins Here, and Who's Still Waiting
The developers who immediately moved on external links — Spotify, Kindle, Patreon — win something concrete. External payment links without Apple taking a commission stay in place while the lower court figures out what Apple's eventual fee will be. That's months of margin improvement for anyone who's already built the link-out infrastructure.
The 850 million weekly App Store users and the $53 billion in annual digital goods purchases flowing through the store are what Apple is protecting here. Every percentage point of commission that gets stripped away doesn't disappear — it redistributes to developers.
For most founders building on iOS, though, this ruling is less immediately useful than it looks. Building a parallel payment infrastructure — the checkout page, fraud detection, customer support for payment failures, tax compliance across jurisdictions — costs money. The developers who've actually used the external link option are the ones large enough to absorb that overhead: Spotify, a $100 billion company; Amazon, which runs Kindle. The indie developer with 50,000 subscribers and no payment operations team is still choosing Apple's IAP by default, even with the door technically open.
"Apple's tactics have meant only a few brave developers, including Spotify, Kindle, and Patreon, have been willing to take advantage of this right and bring benefits to consumers. As a result of Apple's tactics, courts have time and again found this to be illegal."
— Natalie Munoz, Epic Games spokesperson, in response to Apple's stay motion
The word "brave" is doing a lot of work in that statement. It implicitly acknowledges what's true: using this right still requires a willingness to absorb Apple's friction and potential retaliation, even when courts say that friction is illegal.
The Skeptic's Corner
Here's what the Epic-wins narrative glosses over: Tim Sweeney didn't get what he actually wanted. Epic's original goal was full alternative app distribution on iOS — its own store, its own payment rails, competing directly with Apple's platform. The court said Apple isn't a monopoly. What Epic has won, after five years of litigation, is the right for developers to add a link in their app that routes users to a website. That's not nothing, but it's not the iPhone's App Store equivalent of Android's sideloading, either. Sweeney has been more candid about this than most coverage acknowledges.
The Global Dimension: Where This Is Happening Faster Than in America
While American courts inch forward, regulators elsewhere have moved more bluntly.
On April 23, 2025, the European Commission found Apple non-compliant with the Digital Markets Act and fined it €500 million. Apple was given 60 days to comply with the Commission's decisions or face periodic penalty payments. Tech Policy Press
Conservative estimates from legal analysts suggested that had Apple complied with the relevant DMA provision from March 2024, app developers in Europe would have retained additional revenue potentially exceeding €100 million per month, based solely on actual purchase volumes of digital goods and services. That figure is contestable — it assumes meaningful developer adoption of external payments — but the order of magnitude suggests why Apple has fought compliance so hard in Brussels as well as San Francisco. Lexology
The UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, passed in May 2024, creates a similar framework. The Coalition for App Fairness, whose members include Spotify, Deezer, and Match Group among others, has been coordinating pressure campaigns in both Brussels and London simultaneously. What started as a US courtroom dispute has become a multi-jurisdiction regulatory assault — and Apple is fighting on every front.
This matters for founders building globally because the outcome isn't going to be uniform. A developer operating in the EU under DMA terms, the US under the Epic injunction framework, and the UK under the DMCC could plausibly face three different fee structures from the same platform by the time these cases resolve. That's not hypothetical; it's the current direction of travel.
What Comes Next
1. The Supreme Court question. Apple has no more options within the Ninth Circuit and plans to take its case to the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, Apple is expected to challenge the legal standards used to hold it in contempt and argue that courts should not be allowed to limit the fees it can charge for its services. The Supreme Court previously declined to hear an earlier iteration of this dispute. Whether it takes up the contempt question specifically is genuinely uncertain — and this is one of the few honest unknowns in the whole saga. TechCrunch
2. What "reasonable" means. A federal judge is now going to determine what percentage Apple can charge on externally-linked purchases. This is extraordinary. Judges do not typically set commission rates for technology platforms. Whatever number emerges from that process will be challenged, appealed, and relitigated. The decision might not land until well into 2027.
3. Whether anyone actually uses the links. The real-world impact of this ruling hinges entirely on developer adoption, and adoption hinges on Apple's ability to make the experience of using external payments subtly worse — through friction, warning screens, and UX patterns that technically comply while practically discouraging use. This is what "malicious compliance" looks like in practice, and it's been effective.
After five years of filings, the question Epic Games forced into the open — who sets the price of access to a captive platform — still doesn't have a clean answer. The Ninth Circuit has now said twice that Apple's answer was wrong. The district court will try to write a better one. Apple will appeal that too.
The founders who should be watching most closely aren't the ones building consumer apps on iOS. They're the ones building the next infrastructure layer — the payment processors, the web checkout tools, the customer support platforms — that becomes essential if developers actually start using these external links at scale. That market exists, and it's about to get a lot more interesting.
Epic Games lit this particular fuse in August 2020 when it deliberately triggered Apple's enforcement mechanism to manufacture a legal case. Whatever you think of Sweeney's motives, the fuse is still burning. The explosion, when it comes, will reshape margins across the entire mobile economy.
