Apple's EU fee overhaul: a flat 5%, a 26/20/15 ladder, and October 1

Apple overhauled its EU App Store fee structure again on August 18, and the new terms take effect October 1. Apps distributed outside the App Store under the DMA's alternative-distribution provisions will pay a flat 5% Core Technology Commission on digital goods. Apps that stay inside the App Store move to a tiered commission structure: 26%, 20%, or 15% depending on the developer's revenue tier and the services they use, replacing the flatter standard terms that had been in place since January.

This is Apple's third meaningful change to the EU fee model this year, and the direction is consistent even as the numbers move. In January, the per-install Core Technology Fee that had drawn most of the Coalition for App Fairness's criticism was replaced with a 5% Core Technology Commission on digital goods for developers on standard terms, a change we covered at the time as a shift from a fee that punished scale to one that scaled with revenue. The Coalition said then that the change still did not comply with the DMA's intent. This August revision does not resolve that argument. It extends the same logic, a commission tied to revenue rather than install volume, to a wider set of distribution scenarios, while introducing tiers inside the App Store that did not exist under the January terms.

What the numbers mean in practice

For a developer distributing outside the App Store under DMA terms, the flat 5% commission on digital goods is now the headline number to model against a web-shop strategy, and it is a materially lower take than commission structures that predate the DMA overhaul. That is the strongest incentive yet for EU-based developers to route higher-value transactions to owned web shops, a trend Xsolla's Web Shop Ecosystem announcement earlier this month already pointed to at an industry level.

For developers who stay inside the App Store, the 26/20/15 ladder is more complicated to plan around because it depends on revenue tier and which Apple services a developer uses, details Apple has historically adjusted the definitions of over time. Finance and UA teams modelling Q4 budgets should not assume their current tier holds without checking Apple's published tier criteria directly once the October 1 terms are live in full.

What buyers should do before October 1

Three actions make sense with six weeks of runway. First, model both paths, the in-App-Store ladder and the outside-App-Store flat commission, against actual EU revenue mix rather than headline numbers, since the answer will differ by title and by how concentrated revenue is among high spenders. Second, treat any web-shop migration decision as a Q4 project with a hard deadline, because building compliant off-platform purchase flows and creative under time pressure produces worse outcomes than starting now. Third, watch for further Coalition for App Fairness commentary or EU regulator response in the coming weeks. Apple's January change drew immediate pushback, and a bigger revision in August, arriving mid-litigation on the separate Epic v Apple track working through the Ninth Circuit and now the Supreme Court, is unlikely to pass without comment from either the Commission or the developers it is meant to help.

The pattern across the year has been Apple negotiating the shape of EU compliance in public, one revision at a time, rather than settling on final terms. Buyers planning EU spend for Q4 should build fee-sensitivity into their models rather than treating October 1 as the last word.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• Apple's Core Technology Commission and the 5% math
• Apple's 5% Core Technology Commission: what the EU fee swap changes for web shop math