An Apple-funded study says developers using the App Store generated $1.3T globally in billings and sales in 2024, 90% on which developers paid no commission
https://www.apple.com/... Jeff Johnson / @lapcatsoftware@mastodon.social : New blog post: — Why does Apple make a minority of developers finance the entire App Store? — https://lapcatsoftware.com/... Jeff Johnson / @lapcatsoftware@mastodon.social : According to a study financed by me, I am solely responsible for everything good in the world. https://mastodon.social/... Jeff Johnson / @lapcatsoftware@mastodon.social : “For more than 90 percent of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store ecosystem, developers did not pay any commission to Apple.” — That's an interesting claim for Apple to make, because the natural question to ask is why Apple is picking on the other 10% and forcing them to finance the whole ecosystem.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the global extension of a recent U.S. App Store economic-impact estimate, which put 2024 billings and sales at $406 billion and likewise emphasized that most sales carried no Apple commission.
The study also fits a longer Apple effort to substantiate its App Store economics, following its use of economists to argue against anticompetitive commission claims. Its significance is therefore chiefly evidentiary and political: it frames the store as an ecosystem whose facilitated commerce is much larger than its commission-bearing transactions.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a commissioned study it can use in discussions of App Store fees and market power, centered on the claim that 90% of facilitated billings and sales paid no commission.
- Developers and critics gain a more clearly defined point of dispute: the study’s total includes sales facilitated through the App Store, not solely transactions from which Apple collects a fee.
Second-order effects
- The framing increases pressure on fee-policy debates to distinguish between an app marketplace’s overall commerce volume and its commission revenue, rather than treating the two as interchangeable.
- Competing app platforms and developer advocates can be expected to emphasize their own measurement choices—such as which transactions count as marketplace-enabled—when comparing take rates and platform value.
Third-order effects
- If platform operators increasingly use ecosystem-wide commerce estimates in policy arguments, scrutiny may shift toward standardized disclosure of transaction categories, fees, and the boundaries of “facilitated” sales.
- The underlying structural question remains whether app-store regulation should assess a platform’s commission on paid transactions or its broader control over distribution and commercial access.
The trend: App-store operators are increasingly defending their economic role with ecosystem-scale commerce metrics as scrutiny of platform take rates persists.