Apple clarifies that it will still collect a commission from Dutch devs who use 3rd-party payments; Google will too in South Korea, just lowering its fee by 4%
On December 24th of last year, the Netherlands' competition regulator, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple and Google are responding to separate national payment interventions by preserving a platform fee even when developers route transactions outside their billing systems. In the Netherlands, the dispute centered on the ACM and Apple’s treatment of Dutch developers; later coverage shows the policy being narrowed to Dutch dating apps using third-party processors.
The immediate significance is not merely permission for alternative payments, but the price of that permission. Apple’s later Dutch proposal made the residual charge explicit as a 27% fee for alternative-payment dating apps, while Google’s South Korean reduction was only four percentage points.
First-order effects
- Dutch developers using third-party payments still owe Apple a commission, limiting the direct savings from moving payment processing off Apple’s system.
- South Korean developers receive a 4% lower Google commission when using third-party payments, but Google retains a take rate on those transactions.
Second-order effects
- Payment processors can compete for transactions in the Netherlands and South Korea, but must do so against app-store fees that continue to absorb much of the potential economic benefit for developers.
- Apple’s Dutch rules concentrate the change on dating apps, while Google’s fee reduction sets a comparison point for developers and regulators evaluating whether alternative-payment access produces meaningful price competition.
Third-order effects
- The cases establish a regulated-platform model in which alternative payment routing can be permitted without surrendering the app store’s transaction revenue, shifting disputes toward the level and scope of the residual fee.
- Later EU-focused pricing changes, including Apple’s reduced EU commission structure, indicate that country-by-country payment remedies can evolve into differentiated regional fee schedules rather than a single global rule.
The trend: App-store payment regulation is moving from a binary choice between mandated in-app billing and open payments toward negotiated rules over residual platform take rates.