If your iOS app sells anything digital in the US, you can send users to your own web checkout today and Apple takes nothing from that sale. That has been true since the contempt ruling in Epic v. Apple in April 2025, and it still holds while a court works out what Apple may charge instead. Apple’s opening bid is 15%. Epic’s answer is close to zero.

For developers the window is open now, and it won’t stay free forever. What you build in the meantime should hold up whichever number the court lands on.

The romantic narrative of the solo developer who builds an app in nights and weekends, publishes it to the App Store, and generates meaningful income from passive sales is not entirely false. It is sufficiently true in enough specific cases to sustain the mythology and sufficiently rare to make the mythology dangerous as a planning assumption.

The structural conditions that made the App Store a viable path to meaningful passive income for individual developers in 2010 to 2015 have changed. The App Store had fewer apps. Discovery was less competitive. Users were more willing to pay upfront for apps they had not tried. The apps that met a basic need in a well-executed way could find their audience without significant marketing investment.

App Store Optimization was, in its early form, a relatively straightforward keyword game. Include the right terms in your app title and description, achieve a certain volume of downloads and ratings, and the app store algorithm would surface your app to relevant searches. The practitioners who figured this out first made significant money. The techniques spread, the competition intensified, and the algorithm changed — as algorithms always do when they are being gamed at scale.

The subscription model’s dominance of mobile app monetization was, until recently, treated as a settled question. One-time purchases were dead. Advertising was privacy-constrained and algorithmically contested. Subscriptions provided predictable revenue, lower upfront friction, and the renewal economics that made customer lifetime value calculations favorable. Every growth deck from 2018 to 2022 told the same story about subscriptions being the obvious answer.

The reckoning that followed was predictable to anyone paying attention to the demand side of that story. Users had subscribed to enough things. The subscription fatigue that entertainment services experienced — as the number of streaming subscriptions a household maintained reached and exceeded what they were willing to pay — extended to software. Productivity apps, fitness apps, photo editors, and note-taking tools all compete for a monthly budget that users have become conscious of in ways they were not during the subscription model’s initial adoption phase.

Apple’s App Store commission structure has been the subject of regulatory scrutiny, antitrust litigation, developer revolt, and congressional testimony for five years. The outcome of all this attention is a commission structure that has changed at the margins while remaining fundamentally intact at its core. The 30 percent standard rate — reduced to 15 percent for developers earning under a million dollars annually and for certain subscription renewals — continues to apply to the overwhelming majority of App Store revenue.