Apple asked a federal judge on Thursday for permission to charge up to 15 percent on purchases that iOS users finish on the open web after tapping a link inside an app. It is the first commission the company has put on paper for those purchases since April 2025, when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found Apple in contempt of her own injunction and barred it from collecting anything at all.
The filing landed hours after the Supreme Court refused to freeze the case. Justice Elena Kagan had granted Apple a short administrative pause that expired at 5 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, and the full court declined to extend it. Out of procedural room, Apple finally named a number. Three numbers, actually:
RelatedZed launches Delta, a multiplayer workspace for coding agents
- 15 percent for standard apps, exactly half the 30 percent Apple charges on purchases made inside the App Store.
- 10 percent for apps in the News, Video and Mini Apps Partner Programs, and for subscription renewals after the first year.
- 5 percent for the Small Business Program, which covers developers earning under $1 million a year and therefore most of the App Store by headcount.
None of it is in effect. Gonzalez Rogers has to approve a rate before Apple can charge one, and Epic Games has already said the correct rate is zero.
How did Apple end up asking a judge to approve its own price list?
The short version starts in 2021, when Gonzalez Rogers ordered Apple to stop blocking developers from telling users about cheaper payment options elsewhere. Apple complied slowly and, in January 2024, on its own terms: developers could add an external link, and Apple would take 27 percent of whatever the user spent, or 12 percent for small businesses. Add a payment processor's cut on top and the math landed almost exactly where the 30 percent in-app fee already was. Developers noticed. So did the judge.
In April 2025 she ruled that Apple had built the 27 percent fee specifically to preserve the revenue her injunction was meant to open up, held the company in civil contempt, referred the matter to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt, and banned Apple from taking any commission on link-out purchases. The Ninth Circuit left that order standing. For roughly sixteen months, an American iOS developer who sends a customer to a web checkout has paid Apple nothing.
- Sep 2021Gonzalez Rogers bars Apple's anti-steering rules apps may link to outside payment
- Jan 2024Apple allows link-outs at 27 percent 12 percent for small business
- Apr 2025Contempt ruling, commission cut to zero criminal referral to prosecutors
- Aug 11, 2026District court refuses to postpone the rate fight Apple appeals upward
- Aug 12, 2026Justice Kagan grants a one-day stay expires 5 p.m. Thursday
- Aug 13, 2026Supreme Court declines a longer pause, Apple files 15/10/5 the proposal at issue
- Oct 2026Supreme Court hears Apple's underlying appeal new term
- TBDGonzalez Rogers rules on the rate zero stays until she does
What is Apple's case for 15 percent?
Apple argues it should recover what it spends on the tools, technology and services that make an iOS app possible in the first place: the SDKs, the review pipeline, notarization, the distribution itself. A user who taps a link inside an app got to that app through Apple's store, so Apple's position is that the transaction is not really happening outside its ecosystem at all.
The filing also leans hard on a comparison. Google Play, Apple says, charges 20 percent as its standard external-offer rate, 15 percent for special programs and 10 percent on renewals, and Epic Games agreed to those terms. Against that benchmark, 15 percent reads as a discount. It is a smart framing for a courtroom, though it quietly assumes the question is what a reasonable platform fee looks like rather than whether Apple is entitled to a fee here at all.
| Purchase type | Apple link-out (proposed) | Apple in-app | Google Play (per Apple's filing) | In force today |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard app | 15% | 30% | 20% | 0% |
| Small Business Program | 5% | 15% | 15% | 0% |
| Subscription renewal | 10% | 15% | 10% | 0% |
| News / Video / Mini Apps | 10% | 15% | 15% | 0% |
| Status | Awaiting ruling | In force | In force | Since Apr 2025 |
Why does Epic say the right number is zero?
Epic's argument runs off the Ninth Circuit's standard, which lets Apple recoup only the costs genuinely necessary to the conduct at issue. A link that opens a browser costs Apple close to nothing, and Epic says Apple effectively conceded that under the appeals court's definition of necessary costs the honest figure for a web link-out is zero. Epic plans to file a formal opposition.
Apple, in the same filing, asked the court to refer both sides to a settlement conference. Companies confident in their number rarely reach for a mediator in the same breath.
What changes for developers right now?
Nothing. If you shipped a web checkout in 2025 and have been keeping the full amount minus your payment processor, you keep doing that until the judge rules. The planning question is which of two worlds to build for.
RelatedWindows 11's Weather App Is Eating Over 1 GB of RAM
The tier worth studying is the 5 percent one. Most App Store developers qualify for the Small Business Program, and 5 percent on a web purchase against 15 percent on an in-app one is still a wide enough gap to justify running your own checkout, especially on higher-priced items where Stripe's roughly 3 percent leaves real margin. The 10 percent renewal rate is the harsher line: subscription businesses already drop to 15 percent in-app after year one, so paying 10 percent externally plus processing buys you very little except control over the customer relationship. That control is not nothing, but it stops being free.
What it means for the market
Services is Apple's highest-margin business and the part of the story investors price most aggressively, so the question of whether US link-out revenue comes back at 15, 5 or 0 percent is a direct input to that line. The signal to watch is not the headline rate. It is whether Gonzalez Rogers accepts that Apple may charge anything at all for a transaction it does not process, because a ruling of zero would make the last sixteen months permanent rather than temporary and would give every regulator drafting app-store rules elsewhere a precedent to copy. Match Group and Spotify, both long-running critics of App Store economics, sit on the other side of the same number.
- Zero versus something. The rate matters less than whether the court blesses the principle of a link-out fee.
- The settlement-conference ask. Apple requesting mediation alongside its proposal suggests it expects to negotiate down.
- October's argument. The Supreme Court hears the underlying appeal in the new term, and a reversal there resets everything below it.
- Whether other markets copy the tiers. A 15/10/5 structure blessed in California becomes a template Apple can point at in Brussels and Tokyo.
Our take
Apple did not choose to make this offer. It got backed into it by a stay that ran out at five o'clock, and the tiering shows the pressure: 15 percent is defensible next to Google, 5 percent is generous enough that the small developers most likely to draw sympathetic press have little to complain about, and 10 percent on renewals quietly protects the subscription revenue that matters most. That is a proposal engineered to be approved, not one engineered to be fair.
Whether it survives comes down to a question the courtroom has been circling since 2021. Apple keeps answering how much, and the judge keeps asking whether. Sixteen months of zero is a long time for a company to prove it can live without the money, and Epic will spend its opposition brief making exactly that point.
- FilingApple's proposed link-out commission tiers the 15/10/5 structure as filed
- CourtSupreme Court denies Apple's stay the deadline that forced the filing
- ResponseEpic's position on necessary costs why Epic argues the rate is zero
- ReferenceApple Small Business Program who qualifies for the 5 percent tier
Original analysis by GenZTech. Filing details current as of August 14, 2026. Reporting via TechCrunch.