Alternative App Store Now Available.* (Terms and Conditions Apply.)

Apple announced this week that Brazilian developers can finally distribute apps through alternative marketplaces and offer payment options outside Apple's own system. Cue the fireworks. Cue the press release. Cue Epic Games and the Coalition for App Fairness — whose membership includes Basecamp, Deezer, Spotify, ProtonMail, and Tile — immediately calling the whole thing a junk-fee scheme dressed up as compliance.

I'd normally roll my eyes at the predictability of it. Then I actually read the fee schedule.

Before I tear into this, I want to say the obvious thing out loud, because it's true and I don't want to pretend otherwise: Apple's "we provide infrastructure and that costs money" argument isn't nothing. App Store review, the developer tools, fraud and malware screening, distribution to over a billion devices, hosting for every update you've ever installed — that's real, ongoing engineering and operational cost. App stores charged commissions before any regulator showed up. A platform charging something for the use of its rails isn't inherently predatory.

And it isn't unique to Apple, either. Google's standard Play Store cut has historically mirrored Apple's almost exactly — 30%, dropping to 15% for a developer's first $1 million in annual revenue, a tier Apple later copied too. Sony charges roughly 30% on PlayStation Store sales, and I've already written about how aggressively Sony has historically guarded that storefront from any outside competition. Nintendo charges 30% on eShop sales. Microsoft runs the Xbox Store at 30% too. Steam set the modern template at 30% for PC distribution back in 2003, and pretty much everyone since has just adopted the number. Every closed distribution platform landed on roughly the same figure for roughly the same reason — hosting, curation, payment processing, and a certification pipeline all cost real money, and a flat percentage of sales is the simplest way to fund it without itemizing an invoice per developer. "Keep the lights on" isn't a fake justification. It's the actual, mostly-true baseline reason this model exists at all.

Where the comparison gets interesting is that two of the five just got forced lower by actual losses rather than negotiated settlements. After losing the Epic v. Google jury trial outright — a verdict that went very differently than Epic's case against Apple — Google is dropping its standard Play Store cut to 20%, with some developer-program tiers as low as 15%, across the US, UK, and EU by the end of June 2026, while also opening Android to real third-party app stores and alternative billing systems. Separately, in October 2025, the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal ruled against Apple's own 30% commission outright, finding Apple had overcharged UK developers and consumers by roughly £1.5 billion between 2015 and 2020, and refused Apple's request to appeal a few weeks later. Nintendo and Microsoft haven't faced anything close to that kind of pressure yet. Sony has — a nearly identical $2.6 billion case targeting PlayStation Store's own 30% cut wrapped up closing arguments in the same UK tribunal in May 2026, with a ruling expected sometime in the next year or so. So "every platform charges a commission" is true. "Every platform is charging the same commission under the same pressure for the same reasons" stopped being true the moment courts and juries started actually ruling against them one at a time.

The argument isn't "should there be a fee." It's "is this fee actually about the rails, or is it about making sure you never feel like you left."

Here's what Apple actually published for Brazil. Stay on Apple's own in-app purchase system and you pay a 5% processing fee on top of a commission between 10% and 21%. Use a third-party in-app payment system instead, and you're still in that same 10–21% commission band. Link out to pay on your own website, and the commission runs 10–18%. Only if you leave for an alternative marketplace entirely do you drop to a flat 5% Core Technology Commission.

Epic's own breakdown puts hard numbers on the worst cases: 21% for third-party in-app payment, 15% on link-out purchases (for a 7-day attribution window, naturally), 5% on alternative-marketplace purchases — plus a requirement that developers track and report every transaction routed through a link-out or alternative store back to Apple, including ones that never actually complete. Sit with that last part for a second. Apple isn't just charging you to leave the yard. It wants a receipt of everywhere you almost left.

The Coalition for App Fairness called it what it looks like: a structure that keeps Apple's advantage intact while taxing the exits. Hard to argue with the math.

This case didn't start this week. MercadoLibre filed the original complaint with Brazil's antitrust regulator, CADE, back in 2022. The fight dragged through years of interim rulings, appeals, and a delayed Fortnite return to iOS before Apple and CADE settled in December 2025 with a commitment to open things up, under threat of fines and a reopened investigation if Apple didn't follow through.

Apple's official statement on that settlement is worth reading slowly: the changes, Apple said, would "open new privacy and security risks to users." Not might. Will. The same talking point gets deployed every single time a regulator forces a door open — sideloading is dangerous, alternative payments are dangerous, third-party app stores are dangerous, right up until the regulator stops asking and Apple ships it anyway because the law requires it. I've gone through this pattern in detail before — the NFC chip that was technically locked down for years until the EU said otherwise, the same week the "immense technical challenge" resolved itself. Brazil is getting the same script, word for word.

And when the EU forced that door open back in March 2024, Apple didn't just comply and move on quietly — it shipped a warning UI designed to keep the danger talking point alive visually, on every listing that used it. Six Colors called the bigger question at the time: would Apple's years of "sideloading is dangerous" messaging turn out to be true, or just a smokescreen built to scare regulators off laws like the DMA. By May 2025, the answer was on the screen itself: apps offering alternative payment systems got a red exclamation-point icon and a warning banner, placed prominently above the app's own name, flagging that the app skipped Apple's payment system in favor of external purchases. Apple says that warning has been live since the very start of its DMA compliance and that the Commission never objected to it. What makes it worth mentioning here: a US court, ruling separately in the Epic v. Apple case, explicitly forbade Apple from using this same "scare screen" tactic around external payment links — part of the broader anti-steering conduct that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers branded "insubordination." Same tactic, two different regulators, one of them willing to use a word that blunt. The EU version survives on a technicality — it lives inside the App Store listing instead of as a standalone screen — and that distinction matters to lawyers and means nothing to a regular person staring at a red warning triangle before they tap buy.

Here's the part that answers what I wasn't sure about right off when I saw the news: are Brazil's terms basically the EU's terms with different percentages? No. Not even close — and the gap is the actual story.

Apple's first EU compliance offer, back in early 2024, included a flat €0.50-per-install Core Technology Fee plus a steering commission "reduced" from the standard 30% down to 17% (10% for small developers), with a separate 3% surcharge if you wanted to keep using Apple's own payment processor while operating under the new terms. When Apple revised that proposal in August 2024, Spotify called the new 25% fee for basic in-app communication a direct disregard of the DMA's fundamentals, and Tim Sweeney took to X to call the accompanying 15% fee on users migrating to competing stores "malicious compliance." That phrase stuck for a reason — it's exactly what was happening. Comply with the letter of the law in a way specifically engineered to make the new options worse than the old ones.

That version of EU terms sat there through more than a year of investigation. The European Commission had already fined Apple €1.8 billion in March 2024 over anti-steering practices in music streaming, a separate case from what came next. Then in April 2025, the Commission issued its first formal DMA non-compliance decision against Apple, with a €500 million fine specifically for the anti-steering restrictions — on top of the threat of daily penalties calculated at roughly 5% of Apple's average global daily revenue if it didn't fix things. Only after that did Apple roll out the EU terms that actually exist today: a 2% acquisition fee, a 5% or 13% store services tier, and a flat 5% Core Technology Commission, landing as low as 10% total for an established app with mostly existing users.

Apple's own appeal filing admits the timeline outright: the company says it made those changes "to avoid punitive daily fines," while simultaneously appealing the fine that forced the change. You don't get to claim the terms were unreasonable and that you only changed them because the alternative was worse, in the same paragraph, without telling on yourself a little.

So the honest version of the comparison: Brazil and Japan are getting Apple's first offer. The EU only got something better after a regulator fined Apple twice, threatened daily penalties in the tens of millions, and made Apple sit through a year and a half of "no, try again." CADE got a settlement and a 105-day compliance clock. The European Commission got there by being willing to actually hurt Apple financially until the terms moved. Different regulators, very different leverage, very different results.

Worth putting real numbers on that leverage gap, because "on paper" undersells how lopsided it actually is. The DMA caps fines at 10% of a company's total worldwide annual revenue, rising to 20% for repeat infringement. Apple closed fiscal 2025 with $416 billion in revenue, which puts the theoretical EU ceiling at roughly $41.6 billion for a first offense and over $80 billion if Brussels decides Apple did it again. The €500 million fine that actually landed was nowhere near that maximum — more of a warning shot than the full swing the Commission could have taken. CADE's settlement, by comparison, caps Brazilian noncompliance penalties at R$150 million, about $27.1 million. Even the EU's restrained opening shot was roughly twenty times larger than Brazil's entire ceiling, and that's before accounting for the fact that the DMA's theoretical maximum runs into the tens of billions. That's not a difference in regulatory philosophy. That's a difference in how much it can actually cost Apple to ignore the rules — and the terms Apple offered in each market track that math almost exactly.

None of this is really about app stores specifically. It's Apple's general approach to "choice," running on a different department's numbers every time. I went deep on the iCloud version of this same move back in Part 1 of this series — the storage warning that routes straight to an iCloud+ upgrade while the free "Offload Unused Apps" option sits unmentioned, several menus away. Different department, same instinct: one tap to pay, several menus to not pay. Nobody designs a flow that lopsided by accident.

The App Store fee stack is that exact instinct wearing a commission schedule instead of a storage upsell. The alternative isn't blocked outright — that draws a fine and a headline. It's just engineered so every node along the path (commission tier, processing fee, link-out tax, reporting requirement) adds enough friction that staying put remains the obviously easier choice for the overwhelming majority of developers who don't have Epic's legal budget to fight it for three years.

Epic's statement on the Brazil terms ended with a pledge to keep pushing CADE for something better, and confirmed they're still "full speed ahead" to bring the Epic Games Store to iPhones in Brazil in the next few months. Worth being clear-eyed about what's actually funding that fight, though — it isn't EGS commission revenue bankrolling a scrappy underdog. It's Fortnite, which has generated billions a year for most of the last decade and remains Epic's real war chest. Epic isn't litigating Apple out of public spirit. A lower platform tax is good for Epic's own bottom line, and they happen to have the cash reserves to outlast a multi-year court fight in a way most developers can't. (One wrinkle worth noting: Epic laid off over 1,000 employees in March 2026 and flagged $500 million in cost cuts after a Fortnite engagement downturn, so "room to spare" isn't quite as bottomless this year as it's historically been.) The EU shows real regulatory pressure works. It just isn't free, isn't fast, and in Epic's case isn't particularly selfless either.

One fairness check before anyone fully casts Epic as the underdog hero here: the Epic Games Store charges a commission too. 12% on PC, where it's run since launch, and the same 12% in the markets where Epic already operates its own alternative mobile storefront — the same rate it's planning to bring to iPhones in Brazil. Developers keep the first $1 million in net revenue per product per year, then the standard 88/12 split kicks in. That's a real discount against the 21% Apple just announced, and well below the 30% that Apple, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all treated as gospel for years. But it isn't zero, and Epic isn't a nonprofit. It's a publisher-platform with a direct financial interest in every competitor's commission staying high enough that 12% keeps looking generous by comparison. The fight against Apple's fees is still the right fight. Just don't mistake the company leading it for a charity.

Alternative app store now available. Terms and conditions apply. Ask the EU how long it took to shrink that asterisk.

Thoughts? Find me on Mastodon at @ppb1701@ppb.social.