Quick take: It’s a genuinely busy week for App Store developers, and not in a fun way. Apple has updated its App Review Guidelines again to reflect an appellate court ruling on external purchase links, while separately asking developers to avoid scheduling price increases between August 2 and August 4 as part of a currency transition, and reminding everyone that dual lev-and-euro pricing disclosures remain mandatory through August 8. None of these threads is brand new, but their deadlines are now converging in the same seven-day window — which is exactly the kind of scheduling headache that makes App Store compliance feel like a part-time job.
The long tail of Epic v. Apple keeps getting longer
To understand why Apple keeps updating the same section of its guidelines, it helps to remember how long this fight has actually been running. The dispute traces back to Epic Games’ original 2020 lawsuit, which challenged Apple’s control over in-app purchases and its restrictions on directing users to alternative payment methods. Years of injunctions, contempt findings, and appeals later, the fight over exactly how much Apple can charge — and how prominently developers can point users toward cheaper options outside the App Store — is still not fully resolved.
The latest chapter involves the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that Apple may charge a commission on purchases made through external links, but only one based on costs that are “genuinely and reasonably necessary” for Apple’s role in coordinating those linked-out purchases — not an arbitrarily set percentage designed to discourage developers from using the option at all. Crucially, the ruling also affirmed an earlier ban on Apple’s so-called “scare screen” warnings, the interstitial messages that cautioned users before they left the app to complete a purchase elsewhere, while introducing a new wrinkle: Apple is now permitted to prevent external purchase links from being visually more prominent than its own in-app purchase buttons.
The practical effect is a rare split decision: developers keep the freedom to link out without scare tactics standing in the way, but Apple keeps a seat at the table when it comes to both fees and visual hierarchy.
What the actual commission rate will be remains genuinely unresolved. The district court has not set a timeline for determining what qualifies as “genuinely and reasonably necessary,” and until that determination is made, the current 0% commission on external link purchases remains technically in effect — a state of limbo that’s proven surprisingly favorable to developers in the interim, even as everyone involved acknowledges it’s temporary.
Updated guidelines, same underlying tension
In response to the ruling, Apple has again revised its App Review Guidelines, specifically the language in section 3.1.1 covering buttons, external links, and calls to action. On the United States storefront, developers can now include these elements without needing a special entitlement — a meaningful simplification compared to the earlier regime, which required developers to formally apply for permission to do something as simple as adding a link to their own website.
For developers who’ve watched this saga unfold over multiple years now, the pattern has become familiar: a court ruling forces a guideline change, Apple states its disagreement publicly while confirming it will comply, and an appeal continues in parallel. That’s precisely what’s happening again — Apple has continued pursuing its appeal even as it updates guidelines to reflect the current legal reality, meaning developers building against these rules today should treat the current language as durable enough to build on, but not so durable that it’s worth hardcoding assumptions about long-term commission rates into a business model.
Meanwhile: a currency transition adds its own deadline pressure
Layered on top of the linking dispute is a completely separate compliance deadline, this one currency-related. Apple has instructed developers to avoid scheduling subscription price increases with a start date falling between August 2 and August 4, as part of a broader currency transition affecting a European market moving from the lev to the euro. Developers are also required to display both lev and euro pricing for in-app purchases to customers throughout the transition period, which runs until August 8. Sales and trends reporting, along with monthly financial reports, are being adjusted accordingly, with earnings splitting across separate reports depending on whether a given transaction occurred before or after the currency changeover.
Individually, a multi-currency pricing transition is a fairly routine, if fiddly, piece of App Store administration — the kind of thing finance and localization teams handle a few times a year across different markets. What makes this particular week notable is simply the collision: developers are simultaneously updating checkout flows to reflect the external-linking ruling and auditing subscription pricing schedules to avoid the currency transition’s blackout window, with both deadlines landing in the same handful of days.
What developers should actually check this week
- Review your section 3.1.1 implementation. If your app previously avoided external purchase links because of the entitlement requirement, that barrier is now lower on the US storefront — but remember Apple can still require your in-app purchase option to remain visually at least as prominent as any external link.
- Audit any scheduled price changes. Subscriptions with a price increase set to take effect between August 2 and August 4 should be reviewed; Apple has explicitly flagged this window as one to avoid for a smooth transition, particularly for apps operating in the affected European market.
- Confirm dual-currency pricing display. Through August 8, both lev and euro prices need to be visible to customers wherever pricing appears in the app, not just at final checkout.
- Don’t treat the 0% external commission as permanent. With the district court still to determine what a “genuinely and reasonably necessary” fee looks like, businesses built around today’s fee structure should build in room to absorb a future rate change.
The commission math developers are quietly running right now
Behind the legal headlines, the number every developer with a meaningful subscription business is actually trying to model is straightforward: how much cheaper is an external-link purchase really going to be once the district court sets a permanent commission rate, and is it cheap enough to justify the engineering and support cost of maintaining a second checkout flow outside Apple’s own in-app purchase system?
Under the previous regime, Apple charged a 27% commission on external link purchases — a figure Epic Games publicly and repeatedly characterized as “commercially unusable,” since it eroded most of the savings developers would otherwise gain from bypassing Apple’s standard in-app purchase commission of up to 30%, or 15% for participants in the Small Business Program. With that scare-screen-adjacent fee structure now struck down and a temporary 0% rate in effect while litigation continues, some developers have moved quickly — Spotify, notably, shipped an updated app with external purchase links within hours of the guideline change taking effect. Others have stayed cautious, and reasonably so: building a second payment pathway, complete with its own checkout UI, receipt handling, and customer support processes, is real engineering investment that’s hard to unwind if the eventual court-approved commission rate turns out high enough to erase the financial upside.
That caution looks especially prudent given how unsettled the broader picture remains. Apple has continued appealing key elements of this dispute all the way up the judicial ladder, and separate reporting has noted the company secured Supreme Court review of a related contempt ruling in this same long-running case — a reminder that “the current rules” and “the final rules” may end up being two very different things once every avenue of appeal is exhausted. For now, the practical guidance most legal and business teams are giving engineering counterparts is consistent: build the external-link flow if the current 0% environment makes it worthwhile today, but architect it so the commission logic is a configuration change rather than a hardcoded assumption, because it’s genuinely unclear how long today’s numbers will hold.
The bigger picture
What’s striking about this week isn’t any single ruling or deadline — it’s how normal this level of regulatory and legal complexity has become for anyone building a business on top of a major app marketplace. A five-year-old antitrust case is still actively reshaping guideline language in real time; a currency transition in one regional market requires dual-pricing logic that ripples through financial reporting; and both are landing on developers’ desks in the same week, alongside the everyday work of actually building software. For an industry that likes to talk about moving fast, an increasing share of the calendar is now spent making sure the platform rules haven’t quietly shifted underneath a shipped product.
Smaller development shops without dedicated legal or finance teams tend to feel weeks like this one hardest, since there’s no in-house counsel to translate a Ninth Circuit ruling into a one-page engineering checklist, and no finance team to quietly handle a currency reporting change in the background. For those teams, the most useful habit going forward is probably a simple one: treat the Apple Developer news feed the way larger companies treat a regulatory watch list — something checked on a fixed weekly cadence, rather than discovered by accident when a guideline change already affects a feature that’s midway through development.