Apple's New EU App Store Terms: Which Distribution Route Fits Your App

If you run an app on European storefronts, someone has probably told you by now that Apple cut its fees. Apple EU App Store fees did change: a unified set of business terms, announced on August 18, 2026, took effect on October 1, 2026. The question that matters to a founder or a CTO is narrower than the headline. Do you need to change anything, and if you do, which route should you pick?

The short answer: the rate cut on the default route is small, the choice between routes is where the money and the engineering sit, and a lot of business apps are not affected at all. Below are the new terms, each route in turn, and a checklist for your next planning meeting.

What changed in Apple's EU App Store fees

The new terms replace the patchwork that came before (the Alternative Terms Addendum, the per-install Core Technology Fee, and the fees added in the June 2025 revision) with one structure. What an app owner needs to know:

• Apple in-app purchase: 26% standard, 15% reduced. The standard rate was 30%, so this is a cut of four points.
• Alternative payment processing inside your App Store app: 20% standard, 10% reduced.
• Link-out to your own website (Apple calls the charge the Store Services Commission): 15% standard, 10% reduced, on purchases made within seven days of the user tapping the link.
• The reduced rates apply to members of the App Store Small Business Program, the Mini Apps Partner Program and the Video Partner Program, and to auto-renewable subscriptions after their first year. Check Apple's current Small Business Program page for the revenue threshold rather than relying on a figure you remember.
• The per-install Core Technology Fee is gone. Apps distributed through an alternative marketplace or from the web now pay a Core Technology Commission of 5% on digital transactions instead. Free downloads carry no charge.
• The Initial Acquisition Fee and the Store Services Fee from the June 2025 terms are eliminated.
• Whichever payment options you choose (Apple in-app purchase, alternative payment, link-out, or a combination), you must keep them for 12 months.
• Running an alternative marketplace or distributing from the web now requires meeting any one of seven criteria, and an EU legal entity is no longer required.
• Child-safety rules: apps in the Kids category must put any alternative payment flow behind a parental gate and may not offer link-out purchases at all. Younger users on other apps get parental gates too, with age thresholds that vary by storefront.

Apple Newsroom: Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union (August 18, 2026)

To put the headline in proportion, here is our own arithmetic on the published rates, not a figure Apple publishes. On a hundred euros of digital sales at standard rates, Apple in-app purchase leaves you €74, alternative payment inside the app leaves €80, and a link-out purchase leaves €85. Those last two figures are before your payment provider takes its cut, before you handle the tax that Apple used to handle, and before the engineering described below. Under the old terms in-app purchase left €70. Four euros per hundred is real money at scale. It is rarely a reason on its own to rebuild a checkout.

First question: do you sell digital goods at all?

Every rate above is a commission on the sale of digital goods and services. That is Apple's framing of the commissions, and it decides whether any of this concerns you. If your app sells nothing digital inside it, there is no transaction for a commission to apply to.

That covers a large group of apps:

• Apps that sell physical goods or services delivered in the real world: retail, e-commerce, logistics, bookings for a physical appointment.
• Operational tools with no in-app purchase: field-service apps, internal workflow apps, inspection and reporting tools.
• Business software sold by contract, where the customer signs an agreement with you and staff sign in to the app with an account they already have.

Most of the client apps we build fall into this group. For them the new terms change nothing about how the app is paid for, and the right amount of effort to spend on this announcement is the few minutes it takes to confirm that.

If your app does sell digital goods, read on. If you are still deciding what the app should be, our SME piece covers the wider cost picture.

Why mobile app development matters for SMEs

Which route fits your app

Four routes, in the order most apps should consider them. For each: who it fits, what it costs to build, and what the 12-month lock-in means for it.

App Store with Apple in-app purchase

Who it fits: most consumer apps selling digital goods, and every team that does not want to become a payments operator. If you already qualify for a reduced rate, the gap to the other routes narrows to five points or less, which rarely pays for the work.

Engineering cost: nothing new. This is the StoreKit purchase flow most paying apps already have. No additional entitlement, no tax handling, no reporting to Apple.

Lock-in: you choose it for 12 months like any other option, but it is the one you can leave from with the least sunk cost. If you are unsure, this is the safe default while you gather evidence.

App Store with alternative payment inside the app

Who it fits: apps with meaningful digital revenue that already run a payment provider elsewhere (on the web or on Android) and have people who can own tax and payments. The saving is six points at standard rates.

Engineering cost: accept the updated Developer Program License Agreement, obtain the StoreKit External Purchase entitlement (com.apple.developer.storekit.external-purchase), integrate a third-party payment SDK, collect and remit tax on those sales yourself, and file a monthly transaction report with Apple within 15 days of the end of each calendar month so it can calculate its commission. That report is a permanent operational job.

Lock-in: this is the route where a wrong choice hurts most. You pay for the integration up front, then commit to it for a year. If conversion drops because users trust Apple's sheet more than yours, you cannot switch back next quarter.

App Store with a link-out to your website

Who it fits: subscription and content businesses that already sell on the web and have a working web checkout. At 15% standard it is the cheapest of the three App Store routes. Not available in Kids category apps, and gated for younger users elsewhere.

Engineering cost: the StoreKit External Purchase Link entitlement (com.apple.developer.storekit.external-purchase-link), a web checkout you build and maintain, and transaction reporting for the seven-day attribution window: timestamps, amounts, attribution data and a user identifier, so Apple can match a purchase to a link tap. You also handle your own tax. Attribution reporting is the part teams underestimate: it joins app events to web sales, every month.

Lock-in: the same 12 months. The route can be combined with in-app purchase, which is how most teams will want to trial it. Decide the combination before you commit, not after.

Alternative marketplace or web distribution

Who it fits: few of the apps we see. It suits companies whose product does not fit App Review, companies building a marketplace themselves, and larger publishers with their own distribution. The commission is lower, 5% of digital transaction value as the Core Technology Commission, but you give up the App Store's discovery and its install flow.

Eligibility: to run a marketplace or distribute from the web you must meet any one of seven criteria. They include a moderate financial-stability score from Dun & Bradstreet, being publicly traded, venture funding from an established investment firm, a completed audit by a licensed accountant, being a government, educational or non-profit body, a US$1,000,000 stand-by letter of credit, or 1,000,000 first annual installs worldwide.

Engineering cost: web distribution needs Apple's Web Distribution APIs. A marketplace needs the Marketplace APIs to receive notarised apps, install them, integrate with the system and back up and restore users' apps. Either way every app is notarised by Apple: a baseline review of accuracy, functionality, safety, security and privacy, after which Apple signs the binary and runtime checks verify where it was installed from. That is lighter than App Review, but it is still a gate in your release pipeline.

Lock-in and waivers: the 5% commission is waived for a marketplace operator with under €10 million in global revenue over the last 12 months and under €1 million in lifetime EU marketplace fee revenue. That waiver protects small marketplace builders. It does not exempt developers selling through someone else's marketplace.

Earlier in the pipeline than this? Our prototype-to-App-Store timeline covers review and launch, including payment rules as a cause of delay.

From prototype to App Store: a realistic timeline

What is still unsettled

The European Commission publicly welcomed the new terms and has signalled it is not currently pursuing further periodic fines. That follows a €500 million fine under the Digital Markets Act in 2025 over Apple's earlier anti-steering rules.

On September 8, 2026, 18 organisations coordinated by the Coalition for App Fairness wrote to the Commission arguing that the revised terms still do not comply with the DMA, and naming the fee structure and the lock-in conditions as obstacles to competition. A welcome from the Commission is not a legal finding of compliance. The relationship between Apple and Brussels has already produced several versions of "final" EU terms since 2024.

What that means for planning: do not build a business case that only works if these rates hold for three years. Build one that works at today's rates and survives a change in either direction. The 12-month lock-in is a commitment you make to Apple. Apple makes no matching commitment that the terms will be the same next October.

Nobody writing today knows how the Commission will respond. Check Apple's developer support page before you commit; any addendum will appear there first.

Apple Developer: Changes for apps in the European Union

Nothing changes outside the EU

Apple is explicit that these changes apply only to distribution in the European Union. Everywhere else the existing rules stand: the 30% and 15% commission tiers, and the existing restrictions on external purchase links. There is no signal in this announcement that any of the EU mechanics will be extended.

For an app sold in Europe and elsewhere, that means two configurations of the same product. If you adopt alternative payment or a link-out in the EU, the app needs a regional code path: which purchase options to show, which entitlement-backed flow to run, which parental-gate rules apply, all decided by the storefront the user's account belongs to rather than by device language or location. That path has to be tested for both regions on every release, and the support team needs to know which one a customer is looking at.

This cost rarely makes it into the fee comparison. Two checkouts, two rule sets and two sets of tests are permanent maintenance, and for a small team they can outweigh the commission saved. For how the Apple and Android distribution models differ more broadly, see our comparison.

Comparing Apple and Android devices for business

A decision checklist for the next 12 months

1. Confirm whether your app sells digital goods or services inside the app. If it does not, stop here and write that down so nobody reopens the question next quarter.
2. Find out whether you qualify for a reduced rate today: Small Business Program, a partner programme, or subscriptions past their first year. Check the threshold on Apple's current page.
3. Put your own EU digital revenue next to the rates, and subtract a realistic payment-provider fee and the cost of handling tax yourself. Compare the difference with the build and running cost of each route.
4. Name the person who will own the monthly report to Apple, due within 15 days of each month end, before you choose alternative payment or link-out.
5. If you have Kids category apps or younger users, pull Apple's parental-gate table for each storefront you sell in.
6. Decide on a combination, not a single route, if you are unsure. In-app purchase alongside a link-out lets you learn without betting the year on one flow.
7. Plan the regional code path and its tests before any EU-only flow ships.
8. Put a date in the calendar about 11 months after you commit. That is when you review, with a year of your own numbers rather than a headline.
9. Re-check Apple's EU developer page before you commit and again before that review. The terms are contested and may move.

For most business apps the checklist ends at item one. For apps with real digital revenue it is a product decision with a year-long commitment and an engineering bill the percentages do not show. Make it with your own figures, prefer the option that is cheapest to leave, and treat the October 2026 terms as the current version rather than the last one.