Under Apple’s new EU business terms, apps can promote and link directly to external payments—but only if they give up IAPs and pay Apple an 18%–20% commission. When factoring in an additional 3%–5% in web store and payment processing fees, apps will still be paying 21%–25% in fees on purchases, which is not worth losing the ability to offer IAPs.
As a result, publishers should continue to use workarounds to promote web stores in the EU rather than linking to web stores directly from within apps.
Additional takeaways:
- Although the new fee structure is a non–starter, Apple removed many of the UX and design restrictions around promoting web store purchases.
- Apps distributed outside the App Store will now pay a 5% commission instead of a €0.50 annual install fee, but this is only a viable option for extremely popular cross-platform apps such as Fortnite.
- We suspect that Apple will be forced to make additional changes to its fee structure since this latest update does not comply with the spirit of the Digital Markets Act.
Read our full analysis on Apple’s new EU business terms.
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