The gatekeeper yields: Apple's App Store and the EU's Digital Markets Act
On September 6, 2023, the European Commission filed a decision that used a word Apple had spent years trying to avoid: gatekeeper. Six companies received the designation that day — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — but only one of them had, for sixteen years, operated a store so total in its control that no outside software could legally reach its users without passing through it. Apple had until March 7, 2024, to comply with twenty-two specific obligations. One of them was the one it had always called non-negotiable: letting someone else sell software for the iPhone.
iOS 17.4 shipped on March 5, 2024 — two days ahead of the DMA’s enforcement deadline. In the twenty-seven EU member states, it was different from every iPhone software update before it. Buried inside the Settings menu was a new entry: Alternative App Marketplaces. For the first time in the phone’s sixteen-year life, a user in Berlin or Barcelona or Warsaw could install an application that Apple had not reviewed, from a store Apple did not operate. The Digital Markets Act had accomplished what fourteen years of antitrust complaints had not.
Apple, characteristically, complied on its own terms. Alongside the new marketplaces, it introduced the Core Technology Fee: €0.50 per first annual install, levied on any developer who exceeded one million installs per year. Apple presented this as equitable — fewer than one percent of developers would ever pay it. Developers disagreed. A free app with ten million downloads owed €4.5 million annually to Apple regardless of whether it earned a cent. The European Commission opened a non-compliance investigation on March 25, 2024 — three weeks after the update shipped.
On April 23, 2025, the Commission issued its finding: Apple had violated the DMA’s anti-steering obligation. Developers had been blocked from telling their own users about cheaper options available outside the App Store. The fine was €500 million — the first penalty ever levied under the Digital Markets Act, issued on the same day the Commission found Meta in breach of the same law. Apple announced it would appeal. The Commission noted that the appeal did not suspend compliance requirements.
Negotiations continued through the summer of 2026. On August 18, Apple published what it described as “a single set of business terms” for EU developers: four tiers, collapsing three overlapping fee layers into one rate card. On October 1, 2026, the new schedule took effect. Developers distributing entirely outside Apple’s ecosystem, using no Apple payments, owed 5 percent. Those selling through the App Store with Apple’s own payment system owed 26 percent. The 30 percent commission that Steve Jobs had announced in 2008 — and that Amazon, Google, and every major platform had copied as a natural law of digital commerce — no longer appeared anywhere in the document.
The App Store has a rate card now instead of a single number. That may not sound like much. But rate cards are what markets have; monopolies have prices.
Sources
- A timeline of the DMA and iOS 17.4 sideloading — Promon Security — Gatekeeper designation date (September 6, 2023), iOS 17.4 launch (March 5, 2024), non-compliance investigation opening (March 25, 2024).
- EU hits Apple with €500M fine — Yahoo Finance — Fine amount (€500 million), date (April 23, 2025), anti-steering violation specifics, Commission’s order to remove restrictions.
- Apple EU New Terms Take Effect October 1: The 26/20/15/5 Rate Card — MacObserver — Rate structure details, elimination of Core Technology Fee, August 18, 2026 announcement date.
- Apple announces changes to iOS and App Store for EU — Apple Newsroom — Core Technology Fee specifics (€0.50/install above 1M threshold), DMA compliance measures, January 25, 2024 announcement.