YouTube TV to end support for subscriptions through Apple in-app purchases on March 13
YouTube today sent out emails to customers who are subscribed to its YouTube TV service through Apple's App Store, letting them know that App Store subscriptions are going to be discontinued in March.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time Google has pruned a YouTube distribution channel rather than maintain it: in 2015 it retired the YouTube Data API v2, killing the app on older Apple TVs, iOS devices, and smart TVs by late May of that year. Ending App Store billing follows the same logic — retire a costly integration instead of carrying it.
Apple has been trimming legacy purchase plumbing for years, from ending iTunes Allowances in 2016 to removing apps and in-app purchases from its affiliate program in 2018. A top-tier streaming service walking away from App Store billing entirely is the sharper version of that drift.
First-order effects
- Subscribers billed through Apple's App Store must migrate to YouTube's own billing before March 13 or lose access, and Apple stops collecting its commission on every one of those YouTube TV renewals.
Second-order effects
- Other subscription services now have a marquee precedent for dropping App Store billing without losing the iOS audience, since the app itself stays installed — Vimeo's later decision to abandon its Apple TV and other TV-platform apps shows the same retrenchment extending from billing to the apps themselves.
Third-order effects
- If high-profile streamers keep routing billing around the app store, the platform commission on video subscriptions becomes an exception rather than a default, shifting leverage in Apple's revenue-share negotiations with media companies.
The trend: Streaming services are steadily moving subscription billing off platform app stores toward direct customer relationships, eroding the app-store commission as a default tax on video subscriptions.