⚠ The Steering BreachModerate threat

The payments moat is owning the checkout, so that Apple's commission is taken automatically as money passes through its own system; the danger is that courts are now prying that checkout open. In the United States, the outcome of the Epic litigation has forced Apple to let developers steer customers to outside payment methods¹ — to place a link, inside the app, to a cheaper web-based checkout Apple neither runs nor taxes. After years of resistance and a string of grudging, heavily conditioned compliance schemes, a court barred Apple in April 2025 from charging anything on those linked-out purchases. The Ninth Circuit upheld the contempt finding in December 2025 while ruling that a reasonable, cost-based fee may be allowed², and on 30 June 2026 the Supreme Court agreed to review the case³. Whatever the final rate, it will now be set by a court rather than by Apple, which is a genuine hole in the till.

The danger is that owning the checkout was the very mechanism that guaranteed the commission, and once the customer can be led out to pay elsewhere, the guarantee weakens. The largest developers — the ones with their own billing relationships and the scale to send customers to a website — are precisely those who will route the most valuable transactions around Apple's payment system, draining the highest-grossing subscriptions and purchases from the toll.

What Apple retains is friction, and it is real: the one-tap, stored-card, trusted in-app purchase is genuinely easier than being bounced to a web page to key in a card number, and many users will simply pay the convenient way. Apple keeps the payment relationship for the great mass of smaller developers who cannot build their own, and it has fought hard to attach fees even to external-link purchases.

On this particular strand, the worry runs moderate to significant. Owning the checkout was one of the cleverest pieces of the whole design, and the steering breach is the clearest, most concrete place where a court's ruling has already begun to let money slip around Apple's till — a real erosion, not a hypothetical one.