Apple accepts WeChat Pay in China's App Store, Apple Music after accepting Alipay; Apple Pay hovers at 1% share; paid subs to Music, iCloud up 12% last 90 days
Pan Yue / China Money Network :
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's own wallet never took off in China: Apple Pay launched there on UnionPay's point-of-sale network in early 2016 after revenue-share disputes with UnionPay, Alipay and banks had already slowed its rollout, and it has since stalled near a 1% share of mobile payments. Meanwhile Apple spent May 2017 asserting control over Chinese apps' money flows, telling WeChat and other social apps that tipping counts as an in-app purchase subject to Apple's 30% cut.
Accepting WeChat Pay in the App Store and Apple Music — following earlier Alipay support — is the pragmatic flip side of that posture: Apple keeps its take rate but routes billing through the very wallets it once competed against. The payoff is visible in the subscription line, with paid Music and iCloud subscriptions up 12% over the past 90 days.
First-order effects
- Chinese users without international cards can now pay for App Store purchases and Apple Music/iCloud subscriptions through WeChat Pay and Alipay, removing the main checkout barrier behind the 12% subscription jump.
- Apple Pay's ~1% share confirms it is not the vehicle for this growth — Apple is effectively conceding domestic digital-goods rails to Tencent and Ant while collecting the margin on top.
Second-order effects
- Alipay and WeChat Pay gain placement inside the highest-margin storefront on iOS devices, deepening their everyday habit loop at Apple's expense of promoting its own wallet.
- The accommodation softens the standoff from the tip-function crackdown, setting the template for negotiated revenue splits rather than unilateral 30% enforcement — the path that later produced the Tencent-Apple deal giving Apple a 15% cut of WeChat mini-game purchases.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, global platform owners in China settle into a structure where local wallets own the payment rail and the foreign platform owns the take rate — a split formalized years later in the Tencent-Apple mini-games arrangement.
- China becomes the reference case for 'regulated platform take rate' economics: Apple's Greater China business kept scaling (Q4 Greater China sales later hit $14.56B) even as its first-party payment ambitions stayed marginal, showing subscriptions can grow on rented rails.
The trend: Global app platforms are learning to monetize China by renting local payment rails they cannot displace, trading wallet ambition for take-rate access.