Apple restarts its hunt for App Store margin with Schiller out of the chair

A developer who wired a web checkout last spring is pricing a business on a fee that does not exist yet may return: the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Apple's challenge to the contempt ruling and has not decided it ^[10]. The rate at stake is the 27 percent Apple wanted on purchases made outside the store, the one Phil Schiller testified in February 2025 that he had initially opposed on compliance risk and developer backlash ^[7]. In court he said he worried the fee would create an "antagonistic relationship" with developers and turn Apple into "some kind of collection agency" that might have to audit the ones who did not pay ^[8].

That courtroom transcript is the useful document to hold next to the plan Gurman describes in Power On, which is that Apple is looking at further ways to monetise the store and lift recurring revenue from it ^[1]. Nobody has named the mechanism. So the planning question for a team with billing on its roadmap is not which fee comes back, but how much of next year's revenue currently depends on a zero.

The pressure is visible in Apple's own reported numbers. Services came in at $30.7bn for the June quarter, a record for that quarter but short of the $31.4bn Wall Street had projected, a gap of $0.7bn, about 2.2 percent ^[13][17]. On the July call Apple said regulatory changes had started to weigh on Services growth ^[12]. Take Gurman's $30bn annual estimate for the store at an even quarterly rate and it is roughly $7.5bn, close to a quarter of that Services line ^[16]. The arithmetic is crude, mixing an outside annual estimate with one reported quarter, but it sizes the problem: the commission line that regulators have reached is a big enough slice that a double-digit percentage decline in the US alone has to be made up somewhere.

What actually happened is narrower than a settled rate would suggest: one commission was suspended by a court in one country, and the executive who argued against that commission under oath has stepped away from running the store to work on unspecified projects ^[3].

Gurman ties the departure to the monetisation push, and his verb is a hedge. Schiller, now 66, "seems to believe that such moves will only irk developers and governments", and per Gurman's internal sources, "there was no internal blowup or anything like that, [but] it's something he wanted no part of" ^[4][5]. That is one reporter's reconstruction of a motive, not a statement from Apple, and it should be read as such.

The forcing function for anyone shipping billing in the next two quarters is a single number: the commission rate at which your out-of-app checkout stops covering its own processing and support costs, measured against 27. A break-even below that means what you have is a position on a Supreme Court docket, sized like one rather than modelled as a price.