Apple Has Changed Its European Commissions for the Third Time: a Flat 5 Percent Outside the Store, but Developers Are Locked In for Twelve Months

Apple is changing the rules for the European Union for the third time since Brussels demonstrated that the law applies to it too. This week the company announced a simplified commission structure: instead of the per-install fee developers paid for every download, there is now a flat commission of 5 percent on digital products in apps distributed outside the App Store or via the web.

Step back and you see why this announcement exists at all. Last year the European Commission fined Apple 500 million euros for failing to comply with the Digital Markets Act and warned of further penalties if nothing changed. Apple then offered a new fee scheme - so convoluted that critics gave it a name: „malicious compliance”. A fee for first user acquisition, a store services fee, different service tiers according to the developer's needs. Formally compliant, practically impassable.

Now the numbers look like this. The in-app purchase commission falls to 26 percent instead of the usual 30. Most developers will continue paying a reduced 15 percent through the small business, mini-app and video partner programmes, as well as for auto-renewing subscriptions after the first year. Anyone using a third-party payment system pays 20 percent - or 10 if they are in one of those programmes.

There is also a condition rarely mentioned in the headlines: the developer is locked into the chosen payment model for twelve months. Choose external payments once and there is no going back until the year is out. For a company with three employees, that is not a technical detail - that is the budget.

The most concrete change concerns alternative app stores. Until now, to open your own you had either to demonstrate serious financial backing, or to have been in the developer programme for at least two years with an app exceeding a million installations in the Union over the previous year. Those thresholds are no longer mandatory. It is enough to be a public company, to pass a financial audit or to hold capital from investors. The bar dropped, but it did not disappear.

Apple has also introduced protective restrictions: external links are banned in apps in the children's category, and users under eighteen will need parental permission for purchases outside the App Store.

The question that remains is who is actually winning this battle. Brussels pushed, Apple gave ground - three times in two years, each time after a fine or the threat of one. That is the model. The regulator writes the rule, the company calculates what non-compliance costs, and then moves exactly as far as it must. And Macedonia is not in the Union, which means these percentages do not apply here. Developers from the region selling into the European market use the new rules; everybody else watches something being decided that they have no vote in.